design, beauty, and awareness
After reading Williams and Arola et al. discuss basic principles of design, I honestly felt pretty good about myself and my understanding of design because the concepts were easy for me to grasp and proceed to apply in my own work.
 This is why I was overwhelmed, impressed, and am still curious about Wysocki’s The Sticky Embrace of Beauty which critiques these basic deconstructions of design by suggesting they do not take into account factors such as culture, individual experiences with the world, societal influences, history, etc.Â
While these breakdowns of good design are helpful to the untrained eye or to people looking for guidance on how to make something look better, they don’t take the next step and explain WHY they work due to societal influences on the individual’s perception of what is beautiful and what is not.Â
Wysocki writes, “when we see what is not so formally ordered, when we see what does not have beauty as an apparently inherent quality and that does not, therefore, live up to our formal expectations, we denigrate it, or try to lay (or force) perfect form upon it, or try to erase it,” (168). Wysocki shows us that William’s and Arola’s view of design treats form and content as two separate entities and the content is just something that form seeks to order and make “beautiful”. I have always been aware of this problem in society but never knew how to articulate it until I completed these readings; our society has stopped asking questions. It shouldn’t be enough to say “oh this works, so I’ll keep doing this”; we should be saying “oh this works, why does it work and how can I make it better?”. This applies everywhere, not just to design.Â
Since we live in a digital age now, I feel comfortable saying design has become the backbone of our modern world and should be regarded as such, meaning it shouldn’t be a subject of academia but an ongoing conversation amongst all citizens. We have become unaware of the effects visuals have on how we interact with ourselves and the world around us, and the only reason we are unaware of these effects is that we stopped asking questions (I use “we” because every one of us is responsible for asking questions and developing a sense of awareness).Â
Our eyes are constantly moving, and good design takes control of this movement to achieve a purpose. This realization has empowered me to take control of my design and to ask questions about the things around me that I have accepted as enough. Wysocki gives us some advice on how to go about that daunting task, “we also have to criticize and rethink the formal categories we have inherited for making the visual arrangements that we do; we need to try new and different formal relations in our layouts and we need to learn to appreciate formal arrangements and practices that do not abstract and universalize,” (169) and “There is no question that there is a certain necessity to effective visual composition because a design must fit a viewer’s expectations if it is to make sense… but if design is to have any sense of possibility—of freedom—to it, then it must also push against the conventions, the horizons, of those expectations,” (172).Â
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