All these building methods demonstrate the elegance of solution possible with a creative interaction of tools, materials, and processes.
USE: 'Does it work?' A vitamin bottle should dispense pills singly. An ink bottle should not tip over. A plastic-film package covering sliced
pastrami should withstand boiling water. As in any reasonably conducted home, alarm-clocks seldom travel through the air at speeds
approaching five hundred miles per hour, 'streamlining' clocks is out of place. Will a cigarette lighter designed like the tail fin of an
automobile (the design of that auto- mobile was copied from a pursuit plane of the Korean War) give more efficient service? Look at some
hammers: they are all different in weight, material, and form. The sculptor's mallet is fully round, permitting constant rotation in the hand.
The jeweller's chasing hammer is a precision instrument used for fine work on metal. The prospector's pick is delicately balanced to add to the
swing of his arm when cracking rocks.
The ball-point pen with a fake polyethylene orchid surrounded by fake styrene carrot leaves sprouting out of its top, on the other hand, is a
tawdry perversion of design for use.
But the results of the introduction of a new device are never predictable. In the case of the automobile, a fine irony developed. One of the
earliest criticisms of the car was that, unlike 'old Dobbin', it didn't have the sense 'to find its way home' whenever its owner was incapacitated
by an evening of genteel drinking. No one foresaw that mass acceptance of the car would put the American bedroom on wheels, offering
everyone a new place to copulate (and privacy from supervision by parents and spouses). Nobody expected the car to accelerate our mobility,
thereby creating the exurbant sprawl and the dormitory suburbs that strangle our larger cities; or to sanction the killing of fifty thou- sand
people per annum, brutalising us and making it possible, as Philip Wylie says 'to see babies with their jaws ripped off on the corner of Maine
and Maple'; or to dislocate our societal groupings, thus contributing to our alienation; and to put every yut, yahoo, and prickamouse from
sixteen to sixty in permanent hock to the tune of $80 a month. In the middle forties, no one foresaw that, with the primary use function of the
automobile solved, it would emerge as a combination status symbol and disposable, chrome-plated codpiece. But two greater ironies were to
follow. In the early sixties, when people began to fly more, and to rent standard cars at their destination, the businessman's clients no longer
saw the car he owned and therefore could not judge his 'style of life' by it. Most of Detroit's Baroque exuberance sub- sided, and the
automobile again came closer to being a transportation device. Money earmarked for status demonstration was now spent on boats, colour
television sets, and other ephemera. The last irony is still to come: with carbon monoxide fumes poisoning our atmosphere, the electric car,
driven at low speeds and with a cruising range of less than one hundred miles, reminiscent of the turn of the century, may soon make an
anachronistic comeback. Anachronistic because the days of individual transportation devices are numbered.
The automobile gives us a typical case history of seventy years of the perversion of design for use.
NEED: Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the
designer. The economic, psychological, spiritual, technological, and intellectual needs of a human being are usually more difficult and less
profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated 'wants' inculcated by fad and fashion.
People seem to prefer the ornate to the plain as they prefer day-dreaming to thinking and mysticism to rationalism. As they seek crowd
pleasures and choose widely travelled roads rather than solitude and lonely paths, they seem to feel a sense of security in crowds and
crowdedness. Horror vacui is horror of inner as well as outer vacuum.
The need for security-through-identity has been perverted into role-playing. The consumer, unable or unwilling to live a strenuous life, can
now act out the role by appearing caparisoned in Naugahyde boots, pseudo-military uniforms, voyageur's shirts, little fur jackets, and all the
other outward trappings of Davy Crockett, Foreign Legionnaires, and Cossack Hetmans. (The apotheosis of the ridiculous: a 'be-your-ownPaul-Bunyan-kit,
beard included', neglecting the fact that Paul Bunyan is the imaginary creature of an advertising firm early in this century.)
The furry parkas and elk-hide boots are obviously only role- playing devices, since climatic control makes their real use redundant.
A short ten months after the Scott Paper Company introduced disposable paper dresses for QQC, it was possible to buy throwaway paper
dresses ranging from $20 to $149.50. With increased consumption, the price of the 99c dre