Guest Observer

Steven Kroeter: Design Thinking, Muddled Thinking

One of the most agonizing experiences of my professional career was the annual marketing plans process at the large consumer package goods company where I started in brand management. Each year the brand managers wrote (exhaustingly, excruciatingly long) planning documents and then presented them to ever-higher levels in the corporate hierarchy. The joke among my colleagues was that the higher the level of management you were presenting to, the more certain you were of getting caught in a feedback onslaught of muddled thinking.

I was reminded of the concept of “muddled thinking” while reading a recent copy of Business Week. In its October 15th issue, I came across a headline that read: "The Top Design Schools." Great, I thought. Let’s take a look. Art Center College of Design: no surprise there. Further down: California College of the Arts. No surprise there either. But then sandwiched between Georgia Institute of Technology and Hongik University College of Design appeared the Harvard Business School — which was a surprise, especially since Harvard’s Graduate School of Design was conspicuously absent from the list.

Tom Vanderbilt

Discipline and Design

"Communications office bunker below the Imperial Palace, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam," photograph by Richard Ross, Architecture of Authority, 2007

Looking to get a travel visa, I recently made my way to the Permanent Mission of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam to the United Nations. Whooshing through the revolving door and into the United Nations Plaza, the usual trappings of New York City office-building lobby life were all present: guards behind the desk, bag checks, Tensabarrier lines, sign-in sheets.

Emerging onto the fourth floor, I again felt a rather familiar feeling descend. The hallways, buffed and polished with ancient strata layers of industrial-strength wax, were lined with solid metal doors, each painted the same, Pantone-exact shade of dark gray. The doors were marked with standardized nameplates, each bearing the name of semi-official, semi-dubious import-export agencies and the like. Entering the Mission, I saw a gilt-edged clock in the shape of Viet Nam to the right, and a florid portrait of Ho Chi Minh to the left (a curious departure, I thought, from the usual practice of putting the current head of state on display). As there was a short queue, the small row of chairs occupied, the man behind the desk ushered me into a nondescript back room, where I leafed through old ASEAN trade reports.

Soon grown bored with rice harvest estimates, I began to think about the aesthetics of the place. From the minute I walked through the doors of 866 UN Plaza, everything had screamed “bureaucracy.” There was the careful arranging of distancing space, the mind-numbing repetition of the décor, the ritualized processes of official engagement. But I wondered: How does it get to be this way? How does bureaucratic design arise? Is it a function of bureaucracy itself, or does it work to further the bureaucratic agenda? Are there official guidebooks that recommend exactly which colors of gray will induce the desired feelings of subordination, alienation and anonymity? Does it have to look the way it does to be what it is?

Jessica Helfand

Thanksgiving Day

In a small church somewhere in the southern Pyrénées stands a wall covered in fragments of marble and ceramic tile. Declaring gratitude for any of a number of invisible reasons — personal, spiritual — the simple repetition of a single word forms a beguiling tapestry of human anonymity. Who were these people who chose to crystallize their appreciation this way, through words representing any number of thoughts and events and deeds now long gone? Here, "merci" becomes at once a gesture of appreciation and an architectural statement. The letterforms, some shiny and others starting to decompose, coalesce as a single form — a mesmerizing typographic benediction.

Here in America on this day of ritualized thanks, we are reminded that saying "Thank You" is a meaningful, yet all-too-often overlooked part of everyday life. And so we say Merci to all our readers whose contributions we recognize with sincere gratitude. We are nothing without you.