​The resonance of beauty

By Brent Behm

This spring, the unused, unwanted and sometimes unbroken items that were taking up space in the various residences of the Fargo-Moorhead area found their way to the collective curb for the annual cleanup. A bewildering array of furniture, appliances, mattresses, large plastic toys and more were tossed aside in favor of more space or perhaps in favor of some new replacement. These massive piles were comprised only of those items that wouldn’t fit in the dumpsters supplied for weekly trash collection.

Why?

While training for a career in design, I was exposed to myriad issues of sustainability, ethics of material use, conservation-minded urban planning strategies, renewable energy use and other such subject matter. The notions of quality, adaptability and longevity had considerable merit among my peers. We all believed that our work should endure beyond the now. I didn’t realize those goals would be so quaint or even absent outside of my own realm of design and architecture.

The phrase “built to last” doesn’t carry the weight that it used to. Companies like Apple and Samsung have so successfully cultivated a desire for the new that the average cell phone in the United States is only in use for 18 months. I have about a half dozen of these wireless paperweights in my junk drawer. Of course the astonishingly delicate nature of the devices aids in their early (planned) obsolescence.

Durability does not matter when the nature of our desire has shifted so radically. The phone as a status symbol is something that is a relatively new phenomenon. When I was a young boy, I don’t recall having any judgment about the phone in my own home. I don’t recall anyone marveling over the new cordless offerings of any manufacturer. I can’t even recall the manufacturer of any phone I owned before the cellular age.

Cell phones are only a convenient proxy. In the realm of consumption, we seem addicted to the new. Compounding this problem, our notions of disposal and recycling haven’t kept pace. We store like never before, and the pace seems to be accelerating.

Newly constructed single-family homes are bigger, on average, than ever before. With those larger homes come larger closets, larger garages and even that additional space isn’t enough to satisfy us. According to its own industry publication, the self-storage business is the fastest-growing segment in commercial real estate, with the United States far ahead in total self storage space … 90 percent of the global total; currently that’s about 2 billion square feet in this country alone.

This is a design problem as much as it is a consumption problem. The art of seducing consumers is as much about design as it is about advertising. We designers are, as much as marketing professionals, responsible for the current situation. Does the desire for a thing exist before the thing is designed?

The term “sustainability” is a mantra among many designers, a buzzword for advertisers and the subject of global conferences attended by political leaders, scientists and cultural critics. From a design perspective sustainability does not mean that we should be luring consumers into continually replacing items with more “green” offerings. What may work best to meet the goals of a sustainable material culture is that we design things that have some emotional resonance; that the object, whatever it is, has greater value over time.

At a sustainable design conference I attended a few years ago, an architect said that the best way to achieve sustainable design is simply to “create something beautiful … people rarely tear down beautiful buildings.” This country, indeed this region, is blessed with a deep pool of design talent. Hopefully, that talent will be used wisely.