Embrace Ugly, Question Assumptions

Tad Toulis at Core 77 has written a compelling essay on the need for more “ugly” design. He goes into the reasons why striving for perfection, fleeting beauty, and some sort of over-idealized goodness kill creativity and real innovation. Assumed professional standards are then viewed as blinders to true design problem solving. Toulis calls instead for a type of mistakeism, where these standards are put aside so that radical, freewheeling creativity can come through – even at the cost of seeming ugly or unusual.

He explains:

Is ‘Good Design’ an asphyxiating dogma?
Design is a peculiar activity: It’s a creative process, but a process that subscribes to and reinforces certain restrictive attitudes. It can be rigid and self-policing, since a profession that earns its living by discerning what is good and bad must necessarily become judgmental. Ultimately this judgmental nature creates and enshrines certain points of view, which left unchallenged, become dogma. Today, one could argue that this dogma, generally predicated on longstanding ideas of ‘rightness’ and ‘beauty’ is choking the profession down, and worse yet, stifling its creativity as it faces some truly great problems—problems which if handled with new thinking and true creativity, will define the substance, practice and contribution of a generation of designers.

Embracing the word “ugly”—so readily identified with everything popular design claims to have been a reaction against—seems a logical choice if we are to create a vision for the practice of design freed from the restrictions and prejudices of its past.

Core 77: “UGLY: How Unorthodox Thinking Will Save Design, by Tad Toulis”