February 2002"...Copernicus'aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essentialmotive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."- Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution"All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believedfanatically in his insistence that an airplane that lookedbeautiful would fly the same way."- Ben Rich, Skunk Works"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in thisworld for ugly mathematics."- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's ApologyI was talking recently to a friend who teachesat MIT. His field is hot now andevery year he is inundated by applications fromwould-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart,"he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kindof taste."Taste. You don't hear that word much now.And yet we still need the underlyingconcept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant wasthat he wanted students who were not just good technicians,but who could use their technical knowledge todesign beautiful things.Mathematicians call good work "beautiful,"and so, either now or in the past, havescientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers,writers, and painters.Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If thereis an overlap, can we use one field's discoveriesabout beauty to help us in another?For those of us who design things, these are not justtheoretical questions. If there is such a thing asbeauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We needgood taste to make good things.Instead oftreating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blatheredabout or avoided depending on how one feels about airyabstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question:how do you make good stuff?If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tellyou that "taste is subjective."They believe this because it really feels thatway to them. When they like something, they have no ideawhy. It could be because it's beautiful, or because theirmother had one, or because they saw a movie star with onein a magazine, or because they know it's expensive.Their thoughts are a tangle of unexamined impulses.Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangleunexamined. If you make fun of your little brother forcoloring people green in his coloring book, yourmother is likely to tell you something like "you like todo it your way and he likes to do it his way."Your mother at this point is not trying to teach youimportant truths about aesthetics. She's trying to getthe two of you to stop bickering.Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this onecontradicts other things they tell us. After dinninginto you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference,they take you to the museum and tell you that you shouldpay attention because Leonardo is a great artist.What goes through the kid's head at this point? What doeshe think "great artist" means? After having beentold for years that everyone just likes to dothings their own way, he isunlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a greatartist is someone whose work is better than the others'.A far more likely theory, in his Ptolemaic model ofthe universe, is that a great artist is something that'sgood for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book.Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good wayto prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true.You feel this when you start to design things.Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better.Football playerslike to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It'sa matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better atyour job. But ifyour job is to design things, and there is no such thingas beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll getbetter at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyonewho gets better at their job, you'll know you're gettingbetter. If so,your old tastes werenot merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom thattaste can't be wrong.Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamperyou from thinking about taste, even as yours grows.But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself,that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then youcan start to study good design in detail.How hasyour taste changed? When you made mistakes, whatcaused you to make them? What have other people learned aboutdesign?Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising howmuch different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The sameprinciples of good design crop up again and again.Good design is simple. You hear this from math topainting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to bea better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially,less is more. It means much the same thing in programming.For architects and designers it means that beauty shoulddepend on a few carefully chosen structural elementsrather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornamentis not in itself bad, only when it's camouflage on insipidform.) Similarly, in painting, astill life of a few carefully observed and solidlymodelled objects will tend to be more interesting than astretch of flashybut mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar.In writing it means: say what you meanand say it briefly.It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity.You'd think simple would be the default. Ornateis more work. But something seems to come over peoplewhen they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort toswooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they're expressionists.It's all evasion.Underneaththe long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, thereis not much going on, and that's frightening.When you'reforced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem.When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliversubstance.Good design is timeless.In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake.So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics? He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did:if something is ugly, it can't be the best solution. Theremust be a better one, and eventuallysomeone will discover it.Aiming at timelessness is a way to makeyourself find the best answer:if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.Some of the greatest masters did this so well that theyleft little room for those who came after.Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow.Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evadethe grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definitionchange with time, so if you can make something thatwill still look good far into the future, then itsappeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is totry to appeal to past generations. It's hard to guess whatthe future will be like, but we can be sure it will belike the past in caring nothing for present fashions.So if you can make something that appeals to people todayand would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a goodchance it will appeal to people in 2500.Good design solves the right problem. The typicalstove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dialto control each. How do you arrange the dials? Thesimplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is asimple answer to the wrong question.The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row,the unlucky human will have to stop and think each timeabout which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dialsin a square like the burners.A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided.In the mid twentieth century there was a vogue forsetting text in sans-serif fonts.These fonts are closer to the pure, underlying letterforms.But in text that's not the problem you're trying to solve. For legibility it's more important that letters be easyto tell apart.It may look Victorian, but a Times Roman lowercase g iseasy to tell from a lowercase y.Problems can be improved as well as solutions.In software, an intractable problem can usually be replacedby an equivalent one that's easy to solve.Physics progressed faster as the problem becamepredicting observable behavior, instead of reconciling itwith scripture.Good design is suggestive.Jane Austen's novels contain almost nodescription; instead of telling you howeverything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself.Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engagingthan one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about theMona Lisa.In architecture and design, thisprinciple means that a building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example, willserve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it, insteadof making them live as if they were executing a programwritten by the architect.In software, it means you should give users a fewbasic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego. In math it means a proof thatbecomes the basis for a lot of new work ispreferable to a proof that was difficult,but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in thesciences generally, citation is considered a roughindicator of merit.Good design is often slightly funny. This onemay not always be true. But Durer's engravingsand Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and theoriginal Porsche 911 all seemto me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theoremseems like a practical joke.I think it's because humor is related to strength.To have a sense of humor is to be strong:to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes,and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strengthis not to takeoneself too seriously.The confident will often, likeswallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly,as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings-- orShakespeare, for that matter.Good design may not have to be funny, but it's hard toimagine something that could be called humorless also beinggood design.Good design is hard. If you look at the people who'vedone great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that theyworked very hard. If you're not working hard,you're probably wasting your time.Hard problems call for greatefforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions,and those tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering.When youhave to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessaryout of your pack. And so an architect who has to buildon a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that heis forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions andflourishes get knocked aside by the difficult businessof solving the problem at all.Not every kind of hard is good. There is good pain and bad pain.You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not thekind you get from stepping on a nail.A difficultproblem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliablematerials would not be.In art, the highest place has traditionally been given topaintings of people. There is something to this tradition,and not just because pictures of faces get to pressbuttons in our brains that other pictures don't. We are so good at looking at faces that we force anyone whodraws them to work hard to satisfy us. If youdraw a tree and you change the angle of a branchfive degrees, no one will know. When you change the angleof someone's eye five degrees, people notice.When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function,"what they meant was, form should follow function. Andif function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it,because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animalsare beautiful because they have hard lives.Good design looks easy. Like great athletes,great designers make it look easy. Mostly this isan illusion. The easy, conversational tone of goodwriting comes only on the eighth rewrite.In science and engineering, some of the greatestdiscoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself,I could have thought of that. The discoverer isentitled to reply, why didn't you?Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines. You lookat them and you think, all you have to do is get eightor ten lines in the right place and you've made this beautifulportrait. Well, yes, but you have to get them inexactly the right place. The slightest errorwill make the whole thing collapse.Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visualmedium, because they demand near perfection.In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successiveapproximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawingat ten or so is that they decide to startdrawing like grownups, and one of the first thingsthey try is a line drawing of a face. Smack!In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come withpractice. Perhaps what practice does is train yourunconscious mind to handle tasks that used torequire conscious thought. In some casesyou literally train your body. An expert pianist canplay notes faster than the brain can send signals tohis hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, canmake visual perception flow in through his eye andout through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot toa beat.When people talk about being in"the zone," I think what they mean is that thespinal cord has the situation under control.Your spinal cord is less hesitant, andit frees conscious thought for the hard problems.Good design uses symmetry.I think symmetry may justbe one way to achieve simplicity, but it's important enoughto be mentioned on its own.Nature uses it a lot, which is a good sign.There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion.Recursion means repetition in subelements, like thepattern of veins in a leaf.Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction toexcesses in the past. Architects started consciouslymaking buildings asymmetric in Victorian times and by the1920s asymmetry was an explicit premise of modernist architecture.Even these buildings only tended to be asymmetricabout major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries.In writing you find symmetry at every level, from the phrasesin a sentence to the plot of a novel. You find the samein music and art.Mosaics (and some Cezannes) get extra visual punch by makingthe whole picture out of the same atoms. Compositional symmetry yields some of the most memorable paintings, especially when two halves react to one another, as in the Creation of Adam or American Gothic.In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win.Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software,a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly alwaysbest solved that way. The Eiffel Tower looks striking partlybecause it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower.The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is thatit can be used as a substitute for thought.Good design resembles nature. It's not so much thatresembling nature is intrinsically good as that naturehas had a long time to work on theproblem. It's a good sign when your answer resembles nature's.It's not cheating to copy.Few would deny that a story should be like life.Working from life is a valuable tool in painting too, though itsrole has often been misunderstood.The aim is not simply to make a record.The point of painting from life isthat it gives your mind something to chew on: when youreyes are looking at something, your hand will do moreinteresting work.Imitating nature also works in engineering. Boats havelong had spines and ribs like an animal's ribcage.In some cases we may have to wait for better technology:early aircraft designers were mistaken todesign aircraft that looked like birds, because they didn'thave materials or power sources light enough (the Wrights' engineweighed 152 lbs. andgenerated only 12 hp.) or control systems sophisticatedenough for machines that flew like birds, but I couldimagine little unmanned reconnaissance planes flyinglike birds in fifty years.Now that we have enough computer power, we can imitate nature's method as well as its results. Genetic algorithms may let uscreate things too complex to design in the ordinarysense.Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things rightthe first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work.They plan for plans to change.It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from. When people first start drawing, for example,they're often reluctant to redo parts that aren'tright; they feel they've been lucky to get that far, and if they try to redo something, it will turn out worse. Insteadthey convince themselves that the drawing is not that bad,really-- in fact, maybe they meant it to look that way.Dangerous territory, that; if anything you shouldcultivate dissatisfaction.In Leonardo's drawings there are often fiveor six attempts to get a line right.The distinctive back of the Porsche911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward prototype.In Wright's early plans for the Guggenheim,the right half was a ziggurat; he inverted it to get thepresent shape.Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating themas disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix.Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as away to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration.Open-source software has fewer bugs because it admits thepossibility of bugs.It helps to have a medium that makes change easy.When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century,it helpedpainters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.Good design can copy. Attitudes to copyingoften make a round trip. A noviceimitates without knowing it; next he triesconsciously to be original; finally, he decides it'smore important to be right than original.Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design.If you don't know where your ideas are coming from,you're probably imitating an imitator.Raphael so pervaded mid-nineteenth century taste that almost anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at severalremoves.It was this, more than Raphael's own work, that botheredthe Pre-Raphaelites.The ambitious are not content to imitate. Thesecond phase in the growth of taste is a consciousattempt at originality.I think thegreatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness.They just want to get the right answer, and if part of theright answer has already been discovered by someone else,that's no reason not to use it.They're confident enough to take from anyone withoutfeeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.Good design is often strange. Some of the very best workhas an uncanny quality: Euler's Formula, Bruegel'sHunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. They're not justbeautiful, but strangely beautiful.I'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. Acan-opener must seem miraculous to a dog. Maybe if I were smartenough it would seem the most natural thing in the world thatei*pi = -1. It is after all necessarily true.Most of the qualities I've mentioned are things that can becultivated, but I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness.The best you can do is not squash it if it starts to appear.Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange.He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange.At an art school where I once studied, the students wantedmost of all to develop a personal style.But if you just try to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each personwalks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not tryingto paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paintwell; he couldn't help painting like Michelangelo.The only style worth having is the one you can't help.And this is especially true for strangeness. There is noshortcut to it. The Northwest Passage that the Mannerists,the Romantics, and two generations of American high schoolstudents have searched for does not seem to exist. Theonly way to get there is to go through good and come outthe other side.Good design happens in chunks. The inhabitantsof fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti,Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.Milan at the time was as big as Florence.How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name?Something was happening in Florence in the fifteenth century.And it can't have been heredity, because it isn't happening now.You have to assume that whateverinborn ability Leonardo and Michelangelo had, there werepeople born in Milan with just as much. What happened tothe Milanese Leonardo?There are roughly a thousand timesas many people alive in the US right now as lived inFlorence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardosand a thousand Michelangelos walk among us.If DNA ruled, we should be greeted daily by artisticmarvels. We aren't, and the reason is that to make Leonardoyou need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.Nothing is more powerfulthan a community of talented people working on relatedproblems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a geneticLeonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence.Today we move around more, but great work still comesdisproportionately from a few hotspots:the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker,Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.At any given time there are afew hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them,and it's nearly impossible to dogood work yourself if you're too far removed from oneof these centers. You can push or pull these trendsto some extent, but you can't break away from them.(Maybe you can, but the Milanese Leonardo couldn't.)Good design is often daring. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise.If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.As far as I can tell it isn't.This problem afflicts not just everyera, but in some degree every field.Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular:according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, andFra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of theirwork.Einstein's theory of relativity offended many contemporary physicists,and was not fully accepted for decades-- in France, not until the1950s.Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory. Ifyou want to discover great new things, then instead of turninga blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom andtruth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them.As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see uglinessthan to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautifulthings seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone seessomething and thinks, I could do better than that. Giottosaw traditional Byzantine madonnas painted according to aformula that had satisfied everyone for centuries, and to himthey looked wooden and unnatural.Copernicus was so troubled by a hack that all his contemporariescould tolerate that he felt there must be a better solution.Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have tounderstand a field well before you develop a good nose forwhat needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But asyou become expert in a field, you'll start to hear littlevoices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way.Don't ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe forgreat work is: very exacting taste, plus the abilityto gratify it.NotesSullivan actually said "form ever follows function," but I think the usual misquotation is closer to what modernistarchitects meant.Stephen G. Brush, "Why was Relativity Accepted?"Phys. Perspect. 1 (1999) 184-214.
