‘What’s wrong with this place?’ you find yourself asking as you make your way through your hotel in Newark. Is it that you feel uncomfortable? Unwelcome? You can’t help but shake an uneasy feeling that you’re either too on-display or not in the right place. You decide ultimately to find another locale to spend your time in.
Often, an uncomfortable environment is the result of a poorly designed or neglected space. Much has been said about the role of good design in solving the world’s ailments: climate change, anxiety and depression, the housing crisis, or immigration. On these subjects, both architects and designers alike love to claim to have the answers. At the core of this often overstated claim is a kernel of truth: your environment can affect you.
Identifying “Bad Vibes” in Design
“Bad” design is all around us – from the faucet that’s too close to the bowl so that your hands are shoved against the sides, fighting for room to wash – to the public park that’s deserted because there was no provision included for shade. Bad design could also be to blame for the disdain you carry for your own living space. Why? What is bad design?
The Pitfalls of Poor Design
Ugly | One of many characteristics, first, bad design is ugly. While often subjective, at its core beauty is a characteristic which any layperson can identify. Beauty is often left by the wayside, whether by function of budget, lack of care, or ignorance. Designers and architects can often be the culprit abandoning beauty in favor of something designed for the academic class – take Boston City Hall or any number of other modernist abominations. An ugly design is one that will not withstand the test of time and will ultimately be demolished, discarded, or defaced.
Forgettable | Another characteristic of poor design is its forgettability. Every day, we see large apartment blocks going up all around us. With anglophilic names like “Ashton Gardens” or “Drakestone” that recall wonderful English estates, these glorious cathedrals of economy grace our city streets with little-to-no regard for beauty, design principles, or hierarchy. While they serve a great need, they inspire no one and blend seamlessly into the neighboring facades. Unremarkable. These will not be spared from the wrecking ball too.
Dysfunctional | Lastly, bad design can be identified through dysfunction. The too-shallow faucet mentioned above may be due to a thoughtless tract-home builder. The reason your home feels cluttered, however, may be a function of poorly coordinated or under-utilized storage spaces. It might be that your keys don’t have a bowl at the entryway, or that your sweaters pile up on your bed because you don’t have an appropriate place to store them. Design that is awkward or unrewarding to use, or does not complete its assigned task, is bad design – no matter how beautiful.
A Return to Good Design
What can be done? How can we remedy bad design and improve our abysmal environments? While by no means exhaustive, there are a handful of simple things that can improve design, and ultimately create good design.
Basic Principles of Design | The most noted item is the “principles of design.” These principles include proportion, repetition, variety, and the use of positive and negative space. Our in-house artist & architect Michael Lungren practices these daily and has drilled many of them into his pupils. They provide consistent guidelines through the design process and can be used ad infinitum.
Design Narrative | Often a design proposal will feel disjointed; the decoration in a space will feel incoherent, or a building’s parts will feel mismatched. A “design narrative” can be utilized to remedy disparate parts of a design and provide a common through-line in the design process. The narrative is the consistent thread that (ideally) moves its way through a project from beginning to end, touching each corner and feature.
While the term ‘narrative’ can seem abstract, it can be defined simply as a metaphor, mission statement, or aesthetic direction that can be referred to throughout the process. The design narrative is the rope upon which a designer holds to find their way in the swirling dust-bowl of the design process.
Layering | To become even more granular, you might find that a lobby, coffee shop, or your own living space feels flat or empty. Rather than viewing a space as “floor, ceiling, walls,” a series of layers help give a space depth and dimension. To give Lungren his credit once again, another technique he emphasizes is “foreground, middle ground, background.” These individual layers help frame a vignette in a way that it becomes thoughtfully laid out. It is the difference between hanging a picture on a wall and the rooms you see in a magazine. It is another characteristic that helps give a design personality.
Lighting | There’s a reason other than hot coffee that you’d rather spend time studying or reading in a Starbucks rather than a Walmart – lighting. Soft, warm, comfortable lighting can transform a space from clinical to cozy. It can also add incredible dimension to a space, creating deep shadows or highlighting certain surfaces and intersections. A simple image search for “cozy” and “modern apartment” or “office” highlight the contrast between what we want (and the environments we long for) and what’s being designed for us to live in and work in. Countless studies have explored the effects of color and lighting on psychology. The goal of the designer should be to create spaces that others want to spend time in and enrich the user’s overall experience.
End-User Experience | Designing with the User in Mind
The ultimate task an architect or designer has before them is an overstated but important one – one that can affect our mood, our decision-making, and our time and enjoyment. We play an important role in the lives of the public, in crafting spaces that people will inevitably spend time in. With care, we can make that time worthwhile.
Our Commitment to Thoughtful Design
At NMD Architects, our goal is to weave thoughtfulness and care into each facet of every project we touch. We are often challenged to push ourselves, to strive to the next level of design in order to arrive at a place that we can not only be proud of, but that will withstand the test of time.
– written by Preston Kelly, Associate at NMDA