Good Design Is Goodwill

Paul Rand argued in 1987 that good design is a business asset. The same is true of a good room.

Paul Rand wrote in 1987 that good design builds goodwill for a company. This essay applies his idea to rooms, from IBM's 1964 pavilion to the gala where half the tables cannot see the stage. It ends with a goodwill ledger to keep at every event and a check that each beautiful element also works.

In 1987 Paul Rand published "Good Design Is Goodwill." He argued that a company which designs well turns its business strategy into public standing. A room works the same way. A well-made venue builds the host's name for years. But a beautiful room that fails its guests is not neutral. It spends goodwill the host has already earned.

What Rand argued

The essay ran in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (vol. 5, no. 3) in 1987. The Yale School of Art printed it as a pamphlet the same year. An edited version appeared in Design, Form, and Chaos (1993). The text is online.

Rand starts from one claim. Designer and management are at odds, and in accord, for the same reason. One sees design as invention. The other sees it as a means to economic ends.

For Rand, good design joins practicability and beauty in a single idea of quality. A company's reputation depends on how it looks. It also depends on how its products work.

His closing sentence names the payoff. Design done every day, in ads, packaging, products and buildings, is a contribution. It "turns business strategy into social opportunity and good design into goodwill." His argument about managers and sign-off belongs to the architecture of approval. This essay stays with value.

Goodwill, in both senses

Rand's word works twice. In accounting, goodwill appears only when a business is bought. Under IFRS 3 it is what the buyer pays above the fair value of the identifiable net assets. Goodwill a company builds itself never reaches its own balance sheet.

In plain speech, goodwill is how people feel about you. Both kinds are slow to build. They stay hidden on a normal day and decide things when tested.

A room's value behaves the same way. It is not in the lead count on the night. It is in what guests think of the host the next time someone asks. The cost of eyeballs sets out how to measure that.

IBM put it in writing

In 1973 IBM's chairman, Thomas J. Watson Jr., gave a lecture at the Wharton School. Its title was "Good Design Is Good Business." It was later published in The Art of Design Management (1975). A recording survives. IBM had acted on the idea for years. Eliot Noyes directed its design program, and Paul Rand and the Eameses were among its consultants.

The clearest room is the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Eero Saarinen's office and the Eames Office made it. The People Wall lifted 400 guests into the Ovoid Theater. There the multi-screen film Think showed problems a computer could help solve. They ranged from city planning to seating a dinner party (Eames Foundation).

IBM built a room to put the public at ease with a technology. Most visitors knew it only by reputation. That is goodwill built by design. Its return was counted in decades, not in visitors at the fair.

Goodwill as a design strategy

A more recent pattern comes from fashion. The brand COS commissioned installations for Milan Design Week. Snarkitecture made one in 2015, Sou Fujimoto in 2016 and Phillip K. Smith III in 2017. Fujimoto's Forest of Light filled a dark cinema with cones of light (Dezeen).

The point is the series, not any single work. Year after year, a brand earned standing with a design audience. It did so with rooms judged as rooms and built on an idea. That is the quality Why Designers Can't Think asks for. The test of such a room is whether people come back the next year and talk about it in between.

The beautiful room that doesn't work

Rand's sharpest line applies to every venue. "A beautiful object that doesn't work is a reflection on the company's integrity. In the long run, it may lose not only customers but their goodwill." He paired it with an ethical point. A badly designed product that works trivializes its buyer. A beautiful one that fails deceives them.

Events fail in the same ways. Think of the gala where half the tables cannot see the stage. Think of the activation with a long queue for a short experience. Some stands have nowhere to sit and talk. Some rooms are too loud for the talk they were built for. Each one spends goodwill the brand earned elsewhere.

Not nostalgia, not trend

Rand made the point again. "Good design is not based on nostalgia or trendiness. Intrinsic quality is the only real measure of good design." This season's theme loses its value by the next. Proportion, light, acoustics, comfort and good materials hold theirs. The longer argument about borrowed styles is in the aesthetic vacuum.

Keep a goodwill ledger

Record these at every event and compare them year on year. There are no published benchmarks for them. The team builds its own baseline.

• Returning guests: Registration data matched against last year's attendees
• Guests who bring a colleague: Registration referrals, or one question at check-in
• Unprompted mentions of the room: Open questions in the post-event survey
• Press and social posts that describe the space: A search of coverage in the weeks after
• Sponsors who renew: Sponsorship contracts
• Staff who ask to work it again: The crew and staffing roster

Pair the ledger with an integrity check before the event. It tests whether each beautiful element also works.

• sightlines from every seat to the stage and screens
• queue length at peak for entry, bar and cloakroom
• sound separation between loud and quiet zones
• seats where guests can talk
• step-free routes to every area
• cloakroom and exits at the end of the night

Quality over years

Rand judged design by intrinsic quality over years, not by applause on the night. Judge rooms the same way. Keep the ledger that shows the goodwill they earn.

Rand's beautiful object that doesn't work has a room-sized twin. Monet lets a team show a client a to-scale layout before it is built, with checks for exit clearance, crowd flow and booth noise that re-run after every change. The client can trust that the room works, not only that it looks good.