This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 7, 2011 - In the past couple of weeks, the Beacon launched a year-long project on class. This project is in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and correlates with several live events the museum is having over the course of the year.
The title of the series is "Class: The Great Divide", and we decided to break it down into four main areas: money, education, health and culture. The first design concept was to play off the title and somehow illustrate the major class division in each of these areas. After a few iterations of that, we settled on simple icons representing each area.
I was scanning Netflix last week and saw the movie Metropolitan. The cover art for the movie is a New Yorker-style illustration by Pierre le Tan showing five young people relaxing, the three women in white dresses, two men in black-tie attire. The title and credit lines are hand-drawn in the style of a font that might appear on an engraved invitation. The cover seemed familiar to me, so I looked at the synopsis.
The synopsis says the movie focuses on "a group of upper-class Manhattan preppies who gather regularly to play bridge and engage in intellectual discussion," as well as the new guy in the group who doesn't quite fit in. This seemed to fit the class theme pretty well, so I settled in to watch.
The opening titles are indeed the engraved-invitation font that appears on the movie's cover, and soon I was watching, as Roger Ebert put it in his review, "a world I dimly knew existed but one as alien to me as if [the characters] belonged to a tribe in the Amazon."
The action takes place over the group's Christmas break from college, which consists of nightly debutante balls ("Dances are either black tie or white tie, so you only need two ties," one of the well-off characters tells the newcomer), followed by partying until dawn. What "partying until dawn" consists of for this group: The libations consist of top-shelf cocktails, the entertainment is classical music and the discussion is mostly intellectual (Fourier, Jane Austen and the urban haute Bourgeoisie) with occasional excursions into typical teenage banter ("the Truth game", gossip).
Anyhow, it's a pretty good film. And it got me thinking more about class. And design, as it relates to class.
Making the effort to design something is often looked at as extraneous or a luxury. It's an extra step. It takes knowledge and effort and time. It makes things fancy or ornamental. Low-class things are often considered to be austere or utilitarian.
Now clearly, things can be overly ornate or too complex to accomplish their intended function. The focus can be drawn more to how a thing looks than what a thing is. Just as the young people in the movie spend more time talking about the existence of God and debating social mobility than focusing on their own relationships and growth, one danger of design is neglecting the essential and focusing on the flash.
Conversely, even a little thought given to design could significantly improve a situation when the alternative is not considering it at all. If design is seen as an unnecessary luxury, the risk is lessened utility -- whether measured in enjoyment, productivity, efficiency or some other manner. A basic example of this is a giant pile of data. Organize that into a table, and it's immediately more useful. Sort it by a relevant aspect, and its meaning becomes more clear. Change up the formatting to pop out table headings or highlight important data, and it's even more useful information.
Low-class "design is a luxury we can't afford" and high-class "it must be ornate" both lead to the same end. There must be a balance.
