Persons on this board often complain that a product is all bling and no substance, OR they talk about the rigor of a design and the quality with which it was made.
Question: Can't we have substance AND bling?
Designer/engineers ought to be able to do both. Afterall, doing both is just a design/engineering problem, isn't it?
If I were to come to you and say design me an XYZ; then gave you the following constraints--rigorous and innovative design, high material and construction quality, and lots of bling--a good designer could give me this couldn't he/she?
There is nothing intrinsically mutually exclusive about substance and bling, is there?
It occurs to me that some of the designers that are most admired, like Charles Eames, produced substance AND bling. His products were often brilliantly conceived, exceptionally well built, apparently with a useful life approaching the half life of radioactive waste, and full of bling (in the sense of being exhuberantly stylish).
But there is also less exhuberant bling than the Eames. Hans Wegner understood that one of his thorough exercises in leaving things out required some restrained bling to keep his work from looking like a hollowed out Presbyterian church pew.
And there is bling that is narrowly affordable that it becomes a standard of aristocratic taste. Think Rolls Royce here in preceding generations. Think Bentley today. These vehicles have always had bling to go along with their fantastic prices and high quality of materials and long lives.
pt2
Bling has a broad spectrum. It can be observed in products for the masses, like much of the Eames stuff. It can be observed in the restrained, almost severe, and rather highbrow stuff like Hans Wegner. And it can be observed in stuff designed solely for the richest few, like today's Bentley, or a Bugatti, if you like something a bit more sporting and exhuberant.
Why is there so much either/or talk when it comes to substance and bling?
And why can't we have green substance and bling, too?
I slipped off my design lenses and slipped on my old feasibility specs and two things popped out at me.
A. If you rigorously design and build things with superb substance that work well and last forever, but lack in an equivalent amount of bling, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Why? First, because people need bling in their lives, or they wouldn't buy products with bling so often. Design a long lived product without bling, and a person will quit using it long before the end of its useful life, because it has no bling. Second, blingless products are apt to become invisible in persons lives, like copper pipe in the walls. They are viewed with less loyalty and affection and so generate less pride of ownership and word of mouth long after the ad campaign is dead. Without bling, your customer will forget about you over the long product life, even if they keep it to the very end that you have designed in. You need repeat business even more in products built with substance and long life. To summarize, designing great utility with long durability costs a lot and there should be enough bling in it to keep people in love with it until the end of its durable life, or a lot of capital and materials will get wasted when the customer dumps it too quickly and buys a new product.
B. To design products with a lot of bling and no substance may grab one time purchases, but alienates customers who need function, as well as bling. It makes them less willing to buy what else you sell. It makes them less willing to replace what you sell. In short, you are creating short term business for yourself, but next purchase business for your competitor. Even if you are an oligopolist effectively swapping customers, this is still a waste of your own firm's capital. Creating customers for your competitor? Stupid.
pt3
A cynical, self-interested, strategically minded CEO, if given the choice between low cost, high volume, high bling, sell it quick product vs. high cost, low volume, sell it slow without bling product will always choose to produce the former. Why? Because it is always better to get more money sooner rather than less, or even more later.
But if the same cynical, self-interested, strategically minded CEO were given a choice between a mid cost, mid volume, high bling, sell it fairly quick, and keep your customers product vs. low cost, high volume, high bling, sell it quick, and create customers for your competitors product, I suspect that their CYA instincts and tolerable spike to stock options from the former option would overwhelm their willingness to build crap, sell stock options quickly and fight law suits for the next ten years. Never underestimate the power of appeal of the middle path.
But are there enough talented designer/engineers capable of providing substance AND bling for a middle path?
I suspect so, but I cannot say so categorically. You folks would be the ones to listen to on that point.
Making this shift to substance and bling may be difficult in USA until the dollar is replaced by the Amero and revalued by the central bankers. A bad by-product of currency devaluation and stagflation contrived by the central bankers is that it makes all but the largest margin and/or most monopolistic businesses in USA borderline unfeasible for the time being. During periods like this product experimentation often slows and new ideas accumulate in the file, until central bankers decide they have retaken enough control of the economy (bought up enough cheaply enough and marginalized enough who would not have played ball without such stern measures) to revalue and resume growth.
But other regions of the global economy may be quite ripe for this paradigm shift in products, precisely because of the central bankers stern measures (and the appear to know this).
pt4
Europe has a history of this kind of product--substance and bling--and it has a new currency that is rising in value, but it remains very costly to produce any but the highest margin things in Europe.
China and India have all the right ingredients to design these kinds of products, but it remains to be seen whether the cultural legacies of both places will permit it. My guess is that they will over time, but that it is not clear that substance and bling in Chinese and Indian culture will turn out necessarily to be recognizable as such in the EU and soon to be NAU (North American Union). West is west and east is east in some things, just as USA is USA and Europe is Europe, or just as France is France and England is England in some things.
Frankly, South America, which fully welched on its debts to the USA/UK dominated central banking system over the last decade, may be a likely place for this to happen also. It is trying hard to move toward its own oil-backed central banking and common market system presently and may soon be in an excellent position to try this substance and bling approach to products vis some institutional assistance. They have cultures with their share of taste for bling in the Western tradition. They have an enormous unemployed population desparate to go to work. And an excess of all resources needed to create a vital economy. But overcoming several centuries of colonial subjugation is not easy, because the police and judicial systems necessary to enforce contracts with at least minimal rationality do not emerge suddenly, because of the legacy of corruption that has operated in these societies for so long, often through the enabling of the colonial powers that saw no interest in assisting the emergence of a modern economy in such places.
Don't get me wrong. I do not think substance and bling is a new idea. Far from it. I think it is an old idea. I just think North American and European designers and producers have gotten away from it and that it may be time in certain parts of the global economy to get back to it.
Yes, James...
You saw right through me.
I have recently commissioned a conversion of a Barcalounger to appear to look like Queen Lattifah in her rappin' days. Nothin' like sitting in the lap'o'thuh'queen. 🙂
And I also confess that I have knowingly combined the color beige with Snoop Doggy Dog posters spray paint.
And I recently hand painted some Phillipe Starck mugs with gang script that translates to "Design My Ass."
Sure you can have both!
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