Design and Order in Everyday Life

Design and Order in Everyday Life
Author(s): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Source: Design Issues, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 26-34
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511451
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Design and Order in Everyday Life

Art and order
Since the time of Aristotle, a recurrent theme among thinkers has been the idea that art exists because it helps bring order to human experience. This notion still stubbornly survives, despite the fact that in recent times the arts have not been distinguished by a concern for maintaining harmony.

László Moholy-Nagy claimed (not so many years ago) that the goal of art is to form a "unified manifestation . . . a balance of the social, intellectual, and emotional experience; a synthesis of attitudes and opinions, fears and hopes." Gyorgy Kepes thought that people of the twentieth century live in chaotic environments, are involved in chaotic relationships, and carry chaos at the core of their consciousness. The job of the artist, according to Kepes, is to reduce all this free-floating chaos by imposing order on the environment, and on our thoughts and feelings.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow expressed a similar idea when he claimed that art helps reconcile the conflict between ancient biological instincts and the artificial rules we have developed for organizing social life. E. H. Gombrich restates this theme in its most complete form in his latest book on the psychology of design and decoration.

But what does it actually mean to say that art helps bring order to experience? How does this mysterious process take place? As a psychologist I was dissatisfied with the vague and metaphorical accounts of how art affects the consciousness of the viewer. As a result, ten years ago my students and I conducted a study in which we interviewed a representative cross-section of families in the Chicago area, to find out how "normal" people responded to art objects and design qualities in their environment. We conducted the interviews in the respondents' homes, asking them such questions as: What kind of "art" objects did they have in their homes? How often did they notice such objects? What went on in their minds when they did respond?

Soon after we started interviewing, however, we realized that we were having difficulties. The people we talked to, even professional, educated persons, had very little to say about the subject. They were able to repeat a few impersonal clichés, but it was

clear that art played a decidedly insignificant role in their lives. Although most homes contained a few paintings or sculpture, usually reproductions, these works were marginal to the owner's sense of psychological or spiritual well-being.

There were, however, in every home, several artifacts to which the owners were strongly attached. These objects often lacked any discernible esthetic value, but they were charged with meanings that conveyed a sense of integrity and purpose to the lives of the owners. So instead of asking questions about artworks, we changed our tactic and asked what objects were special to each person, and why. Eventually we interviewed 315 individuals in 82 families, observing the respondents for a few hours at a time with these objects in their homes.

The meanings of household objects

In one interview a woman showed us with pride a plastic statuette of the Venus de Milo. It was a tacky specimen, with thick seams and blurred features. With some hesitancy the interviewer asked the woman why the statue was so special to her? She answered with great enthusiasm that the statue had been given to her by a Tupperware regional sales manager as a prize for the quantity of merchandise she had sold. Whenever she looked at the Venus replica, she didn't see the cheap goddess, but an image of herself as a capable, successful businessperson.

In other cases, a woman pulled out an old Bible that she cherished as a symbol of family continuity; a man showed us a desk he had built, a piece of furniture which embodied his ideals of simplicity and economy; one boy showed us his stereo with which he could make "weird sounds" when he was depressed; while an old woman showed us the razor which her husband, who had been dead for eighteen years, had shaved with and which she still kept in the medicine cabinet. Finally, a successful lawyer took us to the basement where he unpacked a trombone he used to play in college. He explained that whenever he felt overwhelmed by his many responsibilities, he took refuge in the basement to blow on the old trombone.

In other words, we found that each home contained a symbolic ecology, a network of objects that referred to meanings that gave sense to the lives of those who dwelt there. Sometimes these meanings were conveyed by works of art. To be precise, of the 1,694 objects mentioned in the study, 136 or eight percent referred to the graphic arts (photography excluded), and 108 or six percent referred to sculpture, including the Venus de Milo replica. But to be effective in conveying meanings, the owner had to be personally involved with the artifact. It was not enough that the object had been created by someone else; to be significant, the owner had to enter into an active symbolic relationship with it.

5. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

A large majority of the 136 graphic works were homemade; they were often the work of children, relatives, or friends. Their value consisted in reminding the owner of important personal ties, of the qualities of the people who made them. In some instances, a picture was cherished because it reminded the owner of a particular place or an occasion, such as a Mexican landscape bought on a honeymoon. Rarely were the esthetic, formal, syntactic qualities of the object mentioned as a reason for liking it. Of the 537 reasons given for cherishing the 136 graphic works, only sixteen percent had anything to do with how the pictures looked. The objects were special because they: conveyed memories (sixteen percent), or referred to family members (seventeen percent), or to friends (thirteen percent). Formal qualities alone almost never made a picture valuable to its owner. In the relatively rare occasions in which a person was sensitive to the formal qualities of a painting or sculpture, the object was special because the owner recognized its esthetic value. By actively appreciating the object, the owner joins in the act of creation, and it is this participation, rather than the artist's creative effort, that makes the artifact important in his or her life.

Table 1 shows the ten types of household objects that were mentioned as special or important by the largest number of respondents.

As the table shows, the most frequently mentioned special object in the home was some kind of furniture. Again, it was not the design quality of the piece that made it special, but what the person did with it, and what the interaction meant to the person. Because different people have different goals and do different things, the kinds of objects cherished and the reasons why they were special varied dramatically by age and sex.

The youngest generation of the families interviewed chose stereos, television sets, furniture, musical instruments, and their own beds, in that order. Their parents most often chose furni-

ture, graphic arts, sculpture, books, and musical instruments; while their grandparents' chose photographs, furniture, books, television sets, and graphic arts. It was clear that the younger generations responded to the activity potential of the objects—to what they could do with them, while the older generations turned to things that evoked contemplation, or preserved the memories of events, experiences, and relationships.

For example, a teenage boy said that the kitchen table and chairs were among the most special objects in his home because they were very comfortable. He could also tilt the chairs and balance on them, hide under the table, or build a fortress with the entire set. “(W)ith another table, I couldn't play as good cause I love the feel of that table.” A typical response from someone from the second generation was that of one woman who singled out a piece of furniture because of the memories it evoked about her friends, husband, or children: “I just associate that chair with sitting in it with my babies.” For the older generation of respondents, objects often bridged relationships between several generations: “This chest was bought by my mother and father when they were married, about seventy years ago. . . . My mother painted it different colors, used it in the bedroom. When I got it my husband sanded it down to the natural wood. . . . I wouldn't part with it for anything. And I imagine the kids are going to want it, my daughter-in-law loves antiques.”

Responses also differed between genders, indicating that stereotyped sexual roles influence the way we perceive and respond to objects in the environment. Men, like many of the children we interviewed, preferred things that could be interacted with: television sets (ranked 2 in preference), stereos (3), musical instruments (5), sports equipment (7). Women responded more like the older generations of people interviewed and preferred objects of contemplation: photographs (2), graphic art (3), sculpture (4), books (5), plants (6). Women, more often than men, tended to see objects as special because they were mementoes of children or grandparents, or because they had been a gift or an heirloom. Approximately twenty-two percent of the women interviewed mentioned that special objects personified the qualities of another person, as opposed to only seven percent of the men.

These patterns, and many of the others that emerged from the data, suggest that (at least in our culture and in the present historical period) objects do not create order in the viewer’s mind by embodying principles of visual order; they do so by helping the viewer struggle for the ordering of his or her own experience. A person finds meaning in objects that are plausible, concrete symbols of the foremost goals, the most salient actions and events in that person's life.

In the past, generally accepted symbols performed this function. Religious icons, patriotic lithographs, folk-art, for example,

could represent the identity of the owner and his or her purpose in life. But today, widely shared cultural symbols have lost their power to create order. Each person, each family unit must discover a visual language that will express what they most deeply care for.

Of the eighty-two families interviewed, some were enthusiastic about their home; parents and children loved the space and the atmosphere of the house in which they lived, felt close to each other. In these homes each person mentioned things that reminded him or her of the other members of the family, or of events in which they had jointly participated. In the families where people were ambivalent about the home in which they lived, where conflict set family members against each other, such common symbols were mentioned less often.

If it is not the object that creates order in the viewer’s consciousness, does it actually matter how the object looks? In other words, are there objective visual qualities that add up to “good design?”

In search of universal values: color and form
Artists and writers on art usually assume that some aspect of the visual stimulus will have a direct, immediate effect on the senses of the viewer, and that psychic harmony is created by means of such effects. Certain colors or shapes are universally pleasing, and it is by combining these formal elements that designers reach their audience.

Early psychological investigations supported the belief that some colors “belong” together, and that some forms are better suited than others to please the brain. These extrapolations from the findings of the natural sciences and mathematics were occasionally confirmed by laboratory experiments on visual perception, but turned out to have little explanatory value in real-life contexts.

The reasons for this failure are not difficult to understand. It is true that the light spectrum demonstrates regular relationships between abstract dimensions of color, such as hue, saturation, and brightness. It is also true that when we begin to think of color in this way we can generate categories of complementary or clashing colors. However, it does not follow that people perceive color according to the analytical rules developed by physical scientists.

In his delightful investigations among illiterate Uzbeks in the Soviet Union, Luria found that village women refused to combine colored skeins of wool into meaningful categories because they thought each was uniquely different from the other. Instead of using abstract categories, such as “brown,” they said that a particular piece of wool was the color of calf or pig dung; the color of decayed teeth, or the color of cotton in bloom. On the other hand, men from the same village called or named everything “blue,” regardless of whether it was yellow or red.

In Western culture, colors are seen in terms of a rational anal-

8. A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

ysis of the physical properties of light. Having learned these properties, one can't help but perceive colors in these terms. The names and relationships that physicists have bestowed on the light spectrum influence one's views. Harmony and conflict exist largely (perhaps entirely?) for those who have learned a specific way of coding colors. For example, for the shepherds of Central Asia, color is rarely an abstract dimension. The quality of an object is inseparable from its concrete manifestation: the redness of the apple is not the same as the redness of fire or the feverish cheek of a child. When one uses categories, they are derived from the practice of everyday life: the Uzbek women, for instance, found in dung and flowers handy organizing principles of color.

The notion of a universal propensity for certain harmonious color combinations based on "natural" categories or on underlying neurological preferences does not seem tenable. True, it is possible to threaten a viewer's sense of order by distorting the accepted conventions of representation. Most people still do not accept the painting of a yellow sea, a green horse, or an entirely black canvas, but not because these colors are wrong in some absolute sense. The clash is not due to physiological or perceptual incompatibility. The sources of the conflict are entirely different and must be sought in the habits of symbolization that people in a given culture have acquired.

The same argument holds true for perception of spatial relationships. Since the time of Pythagoras and Aristotle, thinkers have been seeking harmony among lines and spaces—golden ratios, mystical quantities. More recently, Gestalt psychologists have asserted that certain figures were more "pregnant" than others, that they possessed stimulus qualities which were more pleasing to the nervous system. Esthetic preference was supposed to be based on the underlying stimulus qualities of a picture, which were reducible to simple geometric patterns.

Like the early color preference work, this approach assumed simple one-to-one relationships between abstract characteristics of the visual field and the way people perceive and interpret stimuli. In fact, it turns out that people do not necessarily perceive the visual configurations that Euclidian geometry made so popular. Basic patterns such as straight lines and right angles are easily isolated and recognized by people living in a "carpentered world," but those used to a more organic environment fail to perceive such "units" as separate from the rest of the perceptual context.

Here, the research of Luria provides interesting insights. In his Uzbek study he asked respondents to sort a number of geometrical designs, which in the Western world would immediately be classified as squares, circles, and triangles. The Uzbek peasants, however, were unable to see such "natural" similarities. For them a completed circle was a ring, whereas an incomplete circle was a moon, and hence two circles could not be sorted in the same pile.

9. M. Segall, D. Campbell, and M. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (Indianapolis: Bobbs, Merrill, 1966).

10. Luria, Cognitive Development.

A triangle, however, resembled a tumar (a piece of traditional jewelry) therefore, it could be grouped with the circle as a ring.

It is not difficult to see that the categories which critics and psychologists have used to analyze esthetics reflect theories of perception, not the actual process by which untutored viewers apprehend visual stimuli. The laws of perception are based on the properties of light, on the axioms of geometry, but might have little to do with the organization of the nervous system, and even less with the phenomenology of perception.

This applies also to some of the more recent psychological theories of esthetics, such as the one proposed by D. E. Berlyne. Like most modern theorists, Berlyne's ideas are based on ancient ideas reinterpreted through current neurological models of the mind. In this case, Aristotle's axiom has been repeated by so many others that the pleasure of perception derives from balancing monotony and confusion. According to Berlyne, a person is attracted to visual stimuli that produce an optimal arousal of the nervous system—stimuli that are neither extremely redundant nor entirely chaotic. Optimal arousal results from a design that has a basic pattern or order, but enough variation to require an active perceptual struggle on the part of the viewer to recognize and maintain the pattern.

Berlyne's model is an attractive one, and it is moderately useful in explaining simple esthetic choices. But as long as it remains a purely neurological theory it quickly runs into the same problems as the others reviewed so far, in that people do not necessarily perceive order and disorder objectively. For example, let us suppose that slide A contains a square pattern composed of twenty-five exact replications of a simple design. Slides B through F are the same, except that ten percent of the elements are randomly changed until slide G has no pattern. According to the optimal arousal theory, people would prefer some of the middle slides in the series; not A or B, which are too regular, nor F or G, which are too chaotic. In effect, this does not happen. One reason is that people do not perceive order and disorder in the designs the way their mathematical structure would seem to require. Some persons rate slide D as the most regular, for example, while others perceive F and G as the most regular, even though objectively it is clear that A is the most regular of all the slides.

There is no question that people can be easily trained to recognize which design is more orderly according to some objective criterion. In the laboratory, one learns readily to agree with whatever the experimenter wants you to see. But the fact remains that in real life people do not carry in their minds yardsticks for measuring abstract concepts of "order" or "disorder." What they see and what they prefer are not determined by objective characteristics of visual stimuli.

11. D. E. Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971).

12. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 54.

The social construction of visual values
This does not mean, however, that how a thing looks has no bearing on how it affects the viewer. Visual qualities obviously have a lot to do with how we react to an object or an environment. But our reactions are not direct “natural” responses to color and form. They are responses to meanings attached to configurations of color and form.

The extent to which a visual stimulus helps create order in consciousness does not depend on inherent objective characteristics of the object to trigger a programmed response from the brain. What happens instead is that some people in a given culture agree that straight lines (or curved lines) are the best way to represent universal order. If they are convincing enough, everybody will feel a greater sense of harmony when they see straight lines.

Visual values are created by social consensus, not by perceptual stimulation. Thus art criticism is essential for creating meaning, especially in periods of transition when the majority of people are confused about how they should be affected by visual stimuli. Art critics believe that they are discovering criteria by which they can reveal natural esthetic values. In reality they are constructing criteria of value which then become attached to visual elements.

When Vitruvius attacked the fanciful pictorial compositions ornamenting the walls of Roman palaces, he based his critique on the realistic premise that “such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been.” Vitruvius and his modern followers believed that natural representation is intrinsically valid and any departure from it inevitably brings disorder or chaos. Order or disorder were seen as being inherent in the representation itself. In actuality, it was the theories and arguments of Vitruvius that linked order with realistic design, and disorder with surrealistic decoration. Romans who were unaware of Vitruvius’s critique could have looked at the fanciest Pompeian fresco without a stirring of unease; while those who had heard of the new symbolic code might think: “This is degenerate art, full of falsehood that will destroy our civilization.”

Without the consensus-building efforts of the art theorist or critic, each person would evaluate objects in terms of his or her private experiences. In each culture, however, public taste develops as visual qualities are eventually linked with values. The visual taste of an epoch is a subset of its world-view, related to the norms and values that regulate the rest of life. Like other values, visual values can be unanimous or contested, elite or popular, strong or vulnerable, depending on the integration of the culture.

The relativity of esthetic values does not mean that there cannot be “good” design. Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain sub-set of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of

such goals. If the system of symbols is relatively universal, then the design will also be judged good across time and cultures.

Public works of art gain symbolic power because they are admired by an elite. The average person meets the recognized art object with the respect due something awesome and expensive, but usually the experience leaves no permanent trace in consciousness.

On the other hand, an old china cup, a houseplant, a ring, or a family photograph has symbolic power if it produces a sense of order in the mind. This happens when the owner, in seeing the object, feels that: his or her desires are in harmony; his or her goals might be reached; the past and the future are related in a sensible way; that the people who are close to them are worthy of love and love them in return. Without such feelings, life is not worth living. The objects we surround ourselves with are the concrete symbols that convey these messages. The meaning of our private lives is built with these household objects.

The varying styles of visual expression, that which artists and critics debate endlessly, is part of the public image each culture fashions for itself. It provides abstract, general statements about the problems of a particular historical period. Therefore, the high arts help create order in the thoughts and feelings a given society has about itself. But these are often the thoughts and feelings of a small minority struggling to formulate its experience in terms of a public symbolic vocabulary. Most people create their own private set of references, singling out objects that will give order to what they have experienced.

The creation of private meaning is no less miraculous than the accomplishments of Rembrandt or Michelangelo. It is true that a great master is able to condense, in a given moment of historical time, the expressive striving of a great number of people. The artist's work brings together what many people want to say yet can't express. The creation of meaning in everyday life often uses trite symbols—kitsch rather than originality. Yet our lives are held together by the strands of meaning these worn forms convey.