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Posted by dorayme on 10/02/13 12:01
In article
<479d1e8c$0$9745$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au>,
"asdf" <asdf@asdf.com> wrote:
> "dorayme" <doraymeRidThis@optusnet.com.au> wrote in message
[...]
> I understand your position that engineering perfection can be beautiful.
>
> What I don't buy, however, is that it is not always the case that a
> perfectly engineered piece is *necessarily* beautiful. Sure, I can
> appreciate "logical" beauty, but the hoary old phrase "Beauty is in the eye
> of the beholder" is still true.
>
> For you a wrench is beautiful (as you state in a prior post). I can
> appreciate the beauty of it's design, and it's fitness for purpose, but I do
> not find it, as an object, intrinsically 'beautiful'.
>
> Design (as I and many others understand it), is more than perfect
> engineering. If it were not so, the world would be devoid of art (for
> instance), and be a sadder place for it.
>
> Producing a well designed and engineered piece is as much about
> *communication* of an idea or style, as it is about fulfilling a functional
> specification.
OK. I also understand your motivation for saying what you say.
But the idea that design is more than perfect engineering needs
more than a mere list of cases to illustrate it. Most of the
things that are offered up to illustrate this distinction are
simply not perfectly well engineered objects at all. I have given
hints about this in my lunatic ravings on this subject: eg. when
I mentioned that something normally thought to be a
non-engineering thing, the colour of a car, I was pointing out
that even this could be an engineering or functional matter (see
my earlier post).
I will concede the following things to those of you who think
there is something in the engineer/design distinction: it is
possible that there could be more than one solution to an
engineering problem that is equally effective. But then it does
come down to matters of quite superficial subjective taste (I
like white, you like slightly off white). But these things are
much much rarer than most people think. And when they occur, they
are not very important and are the worst possible basis to make
the foundation of some aesthetic theory. There is usually a
functional difference between "like" products. As I said to Ben
C, lets talk about these when we have the big elephant covered.
Your idea that I am leaving out art to dry is mistaken. I did not
make the terms of this debate, these terms were dictated by
others in this ng. It is natural to consider objects that have a
use rather things that are in a strict way, useless, however
gloriously so, because the question arose in relation website
design. In particular to most website design, I believe that it
is a sad indictment of earthlings that they want so much flash
and razzle and dazzle.
Many webpages - J.Korpela's website pages, to take an example -
are pleasing enough. If they were "more pleasing" than they
needed to be, they would look ugly. The insatiable desire for
pleasures of the eye often come from those who are not that
interested in the substantial things in an informational or
teaching website. They misunderstand the product they are dealing
with and their demands are quite unreasonable and superficial.
--
dorayme
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