Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

important, it is easy to feel uncomfortable about enjoying the aesthetic side of design, because it can feel superficial to care about how things look. Equally problematic is our growing suspicion of beauty, especially the conventional variety, at a time when cut-price cosmetic surgery, jaw-dropping digital effects in movies and the digital retouch... See more

If you are younger, you may well use a thumb, because it will have been exercised so thoroughly by typing text messages and gunning down digital assailants on game consoles that it is likely to be stronger and nimbler than any of your fingers.

Another tension inherent in design aesthetics is that such judgements are always subjective. After all, there may be some people who like the London 2012 logo and possibly the colour of the Post-it Note.

Not only was this the time at which Dieter Lubs had calculated that the clock faces looked most attractive, the consistent positions of the fingers made the images more memorable, even to people who had glanced at them fleetingly.

Would Al Gore have become the forty-third president of the United States of America rather than George W. Bush if Palm Beach County’s voters had been given a single-page ballot card designed like those in all of the other Florida counties when they went to the polls on 7 November 2000? Possibly. And would history have been different if Al Gore had ... See more

‘We don’t really talk about design a lot around here, we talk about how things work,’ he said a year after the iPod’s debut. ‘Most people think it is how they look, but it is not really how they look it is how they work.’

The work of the German product designer Konstantin Grcic often looks clumsy, even ugly, at first sight, but the longer you look at it, the more beguiling it becomes, as you sense the underlying logic of its blunt edges and awkward shapes.

‘It clarifies the structure of the product. And more: the product speaks – in a sense. Optimally, the product is self-explanatory.’

Once you have bought something from a Muji store and removed the price sticker, all traces of its origins disappear, and it feels as though that product really is yours.