It’s a mistake to believe that the primary goal of design is beauty. Aesthetic satisfaction is, and should be, a byproduct. MUJI, the successful Japanese product design company, has confidently accepted this idea: Rather than relying on visual enticements to capture customers’ attention, MUJI produces what it calls “quality goods” that it feels are better characterized by terms like “simplicity” and “emptiness” than by “beauty.” The company’s three-word motto, “This will do,” underlies its approach to aesthetic considerations. It is up to the consumer, says MUJI, to fill its products with their own feelings.¹

This reasonable stance toward product design might seem unusual in a discipline so committed to the visual, but it isn’t new. The early modern Austrian architect Adolf Loos sardonically criticized men’s fashion in 1898, mocking a widespread “craving for beauty”: “The Medici Venus, the Pantheon, a picture by Botticelli, a song by Burns—of course these are beautiful! But a pair of trousers?” Well-dressed people, Loos argued, “abjure claims to beauty.” Instead, they seek out good materials, excellent construction and visual reserve. In the turn-of-the-century design production Loos witnessed and critiqued, two trends were competing to replace the eclectic historical tastes of 1800s Europe—a flamboyant art nouveau and a far more austere modernism. 

Modernism prevailed through the first tumultuous decades of the 20th century, coming to dominate industrial and architectural design. By then, another three-word motto, attributed to German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was beginning to take hold of designers’ imaginations: “Less is more.”

In spite of his own rhetoric, Mies never fully relinquished the urge to aestheticize design. His exquisitely sparse houses, for example, had chromed steel columns and walls clad with precisely book-matched marble veneers. It was British New Brutalist architects, such as Alison and Peter Smithson, who took the challenge more seriously. The Smithsons were perhaps the first modernists to overtly abjure claims to beauty, instructing builders of a 1950s house they designed to “aim at a high standard of basic construction, as in a small warehouse.” 

According to Rayner Banham, an early historian of Brutalism, the Smithsons’ goal was to show plainly what a building “is made of, and how it works”—and no more. Their architecture was meant to be “good enough”; people could work out their own aesthetic and emotional attachments to it. This wasn’t mere practicality, but unembellished truth-telling through design. The problem with Brutalism, however, was that people’s reactions to it were not always (or even usually) favorable.

Consumer product design employs a more convivial palette, so a good-enough design strategy works better in that arena. When Dieter Rams, the longtime head of design at Braun, took on this challenge in the late 20th century, his motto was “As little design as possible.” His intention was, he explains, to “return to simplicity” and to combat the “ruthless exploitation of people’s weakness for visual and haptic signals.” So, he “tended to steer well clear from this discussion about beauty and argued instead for a design that is as reduced, clear and user-oriented as possible.” This is the same attitude MUJI took on 40 years ago and continues still. Enough, it seems, is enough.