7. Honesty

… no Illusion, Show or Enticement

Honesty is a central criterion of design theory and practice. Design should display the utility‑value of a product, which is the expression of a product’s ability to realise users’ expectations about fulfilling a specific job or satisfying a need.

This sounds similar to some of the above said. And yes, it is all interrelated. I dissected the task of design, being aware of the danger of killing it. More or less of one and none of the other is not my intention. A cake with one ingredient missing, it’s not the right cake.

Illusion‑ design as some design teachers and critics call it, applies superficial, inexpensive patterns, features, add‑ons and gives a product a particular look. For some time such products have the in look. They used to be hot, now they are cool.

What’s next? Those tricks should make the product appear more innovative, more powerful or more valuable and create a utility value, which is beyond its actual capacity. Even though, I do not deny some kind of utility in fashion.

Typically, such products are grossly overpriced at their heavily advertised launch, five to ten times above their reasonable price, and after a short time, half a year to one year their price drops to that of cheap junk, the place where they belong.

Product users’ obsession with novelties and lack of sense of value allows this to happen. Producers are in it for a quick buck, and our planet has to cope with more rubbish.

The designer must feel compassion for the product user who most often is unable to discern between pretentious design features or misleading advertising statements and facts.

Dishonest design exploits the human weakness, our susceptibility to illusion. Cynically, large subsets of the society are manipulated through visual, audible and haptic signals, by waking covetousness, vanity and status thinking.

Another common weakness is the inclination towards self‑deceit. How often must a product user feel strong dissatisfaction with a product or brand? Even they are aware of the deception they still hang on for years and decades before future purchase decisions will turn them away to another brand. This behaviour is described in the saying: ‘Better the devil I know, than the one I don’t.’

Here is a well worth field for the designer to help the user out of this dilemma and assist them in feeling safer in choosing a better product and install a new connection of trust between the appearance of a product and its user.

Self‑respect and respect for the product user are enough reason to prevent a designer from the attempt to cheat. Ironically, very often the designer’s name or logo induces people to buy a product. Earnest design instead promotes a product’s function, quality and superiority.

Overbearing glamour may well be a camouflage, the indicator for the absence of any of those three criteria and should alert us to this deficiency.

Dishonesty only accelerates the growth of dissatisfaction in a consumer-society and leads to, even more, destruction and vandalism. I wonder what else but honesty in design, can make a company or a whole industry survive in the ever-increasing worldwide competition and prevent all living things from suffocation in a global rubbish tip.

PS, 2020: This is what I honestly believed, twenty years ago. Time has proven me wrong.