Has design overplayed its Hand?

As a design professional, I have always believed inherently that beauty and thereby good design enhance our quality of life. A recent New York Times article led me to seriously question my bias, as my mother lingers with final stage dementia in an assisted living facility with cloth tablecloths and napkins and constantly changing appropriately seasonal decorative accessories.

The article describes a New York facility called Beatitudes this way: "The facility itself is institutional-looking, dowdy and “extremely outdated,” Ms. Mullan said. “It’s ugly,” said Jan Dougherty, director of family and community services at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix. But “they’re probably doing some of the best work.” " They use common sense and the human touch to make their patients lives more bearable. That is something that "design" simply does not deliver on its own.

(For more on common sense watch Barry Schwartz's Ted talk on Practical Wisdom. He has moved on from observing the consumer in the "Paradox of Choice" to observing the current human condition.)

The backlash to the emphasis on "design" seems to have begun in a subtle way. An article entitled "De-emphasizing Design" on a hotel management website recommends a holistic approach to creating an environment rather than an emphasis on elaborate design - basically postulating that you can't put all your eggs in the "design" basket.

From the article: ". . . according to Howard Wolff, SVP with design firm WATG, people are moving past wanting things and instead crave the more tangible . . . moving from extravagance to experience, from conspicuous to conscientious consumption, from airs to authenticity, from could be anywhere to you are here, from green is good to green is gold and from trendy to timeless - waste not want not."