What is Cool?
The question is not, 'what do you think is cool?' The question is, 'what do you think "cool" is?' Cool. A fascinating word! Some designers love it while some hate its very utterance. "Stamp it out! It means transient fashion and trends-nothing to do with innovation." Before you go there, though, explain the phenomenon of "architectural star power" products. While you're at it, take a hard look at your local newsstand.
What is this new category of magazine that has proliferated of late-blurring fashion and design? Whether you like the word or not, it's out there and being used incessantly to describe design and people crave it like a cup of water in the desert.
Maybe industrial designers need to broaden the range of elements they consider to be important and expand their ability to sell them. We're so afraid of being labeled as "pretty picture drawers," that we'll go to great lengths to tell you why those Nike sneakers, with their titanium-micro-threaded ballistic nylon, are all about better performance on the basketball court and the result of years of ergonomic and technological advancements. If there is more to the story, the discussion skirts it. Perhaps because the minute we define the sneaker's "coolness," it quickly becomes the un-cool thing on the market.
It's almost like we think of design in two ways
Design that is easy to sell and design that is hard to sell. On the one hand, designers work to improve physical function. To do this we conduct research, test for usability issues through iterative prototyping, and then do it again. This process is easy to sell because it involves tangible tasks and physical deliverables. Therefore, we sell the hell out of it.
Then there is the other, less tangible side. By configuring a product's composition in just the right way, is it possible to make a statement with it-to twist a known convention? Is it possible to force the user to draw an analogy to something positive in the back of their minds, and when they see the abstraction reflected in the product, they "get it," because there is something there to get? The abstraction is real; it's just really hard to sell. Instead, we'd rather talk about tangibility. Stuff you can literally put your finger on.
Michael Graves, IDSA, an architect, puts a little bird on the end of his kettle and tiny ornamental balls on his products, bringing his flavor of post-modern architecture to a very successful range of products. Overnight, he becomes known for bringing high design to the masses. Now Frank Gehry will soon release a line of products. When speaking about their products, these architects talk about very different topics than we industrial designers do. The fact is they don't talk about their products.
Take 100 people off the street and ask them what cool design is
I'll bet Philippe Starck's name comes up more than once. A friend of mine once told me that while listening to him speak in a prominent furniture store in San Francisco, the question was asked, "What does Bay Area design really need?" As the story goes, Starck reached down and grabbed his crotch momentarily and said, "You need more of this." His name is approaching familiarity levels akin to that of Martha Stewart. He has effectively reached the masses without any sales pitch pertaining to superior ergonomics and usability.
Is there a bravado that needs to be there to grab us on some primal level? Maybe if we can't explain it, it's not really there. Chances are, though, it is there, but we achieve it only fleetingly and so inconsistently that even the masters of its creation can't describe it. Can our industry hang a price tag on something we can't articulate or do we wind up giving it away for free?
Wouter Vanstipthuot, a renowned Dutch architectural critic, says design should be "dirty, delicious and direct." There is that primal thing again. In our world, I think his approach would fit more in that second category of "harder to sell," don't you? Is it possible we are ashamed of beauty, somehow embarrassed by it? Maybe it's just not masculine enough or something.
Designers are wary of the pursuit of cool, because of its association with fads or trends. Does cool equal trendy? Maybe cool is just pure original thinking, in whatever form it takes, and these rare thoughts are so moving and fresh that they inspire a reaction, becoming a trend. Perhaps trends are just the wake of cool-as in translucent plastic, floating in the wake of the original iMAC. For all of the innovation in the iMAC, it was the translucent plastic that stuck. The world is big. People only remember the loudest thing.
Perhaps a better understanding of cool will help us more consistently deliver it
We experience anxiety, frustration and even fear from the lack of knowledge on any subject, creativity being one of them. A magician amazes us by performing things we find visually interesting but can't understand. Great science is just the ability to make sense of something that was previously incomprehensible or contradictory. Great science has great value.
It is the challenge of the 2003 IDSA National Conference in New York City to make the "non-tangible" tangible! We will harness cool in the cool August breeze of badass Manhattan. We will draw on "coolness" being generated in other industries that live and die by how "cool" their deliverables are and we will learn from them. We will find opposing viewpoints on what "cool" is and we will listen to the debate. We will think about the "experience" and how our products can evoke emotions that will later be labeled as "cool" by their users. We will uncover all of the hidden pockets of "cool" that Manhattan has in its cavernous depths and be inspired by them.
Cool. What is it? Where did it come from? Can it be defined? Why must we address it now? Discuss...
To be continued in New York City, Wednesday August 13 through Saturday, August 16, 2003.
by Scott Henderson, 2003 IDSA National Conference Chair
©2002 Industrial Designers Society of America
