Why Designers Can't Think

Michael Bierut's provocation, applied to event design. Craft without curiosity produces beautiful rooms that say nothing.

Michael Bierut wrote in 1988 that designers learn to make things look right but not what to say. This essay applies his point to event rooms and looks at two designers who read widely. It ends with a one-line brief method and twelve books that help a designer of rooms think.

In 1988 Michael Bierut published "Why Designers Can't Think." His essay said designers learn to make things look right. They almost never learn what the work is saying. Event design has the same problem at the scale of a room. Craft without curiosity makes beautiful spaces that say nothing. The cure Bierut gave still works.

The provocation

The essay first ran in Statements, from the American Center for Design, in 1988. It was reprinted in Looking Closer (1994). It ran again in Bierut's Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (2007). Bierut wrote it as a working designer, then at Vignelli Associates. He was not a critic looking in from outside.

His target was design school, and he saw two kinds. "Swiss" schools taught process, such as grids, form studies and exercises in abstraction. "Slick" schools taught the portfolio. That meant finished work that gets a graduate hired.

Each kind of school scorned the other. Both turned out designers who were fluent in form. Yet they had not read about the things the form was meant to carry.

His cure was cultural literacy, which means history, literature, science and politics. Without it, he warned, graduates speak a language only their classmates understand. Designers "end up talking to themselves." Print later came back to the argument in Why Designers Still Can't Think.

What thinking means in a room

Every room makes a claim. It says something about the host and the product. It also says where the guest stands. Picture a ballroom with the executives on a raised stage and the staff at the back. That room says something about the company, whether anyone meant it or not.

The test is simple. Say in one sentence what the room says. Then ask if that sentence would be false for a different client.

Most rooms fail it. Think of the flower wall, the neon slogan, the LED tunnel and the photo moment. They move from a bank to a perfume to a software launch with no change. Swap the logo and nothing else needs to change. That is Bierut's point at room scale. It is craft that carries no content.

Two designers who read

In 1959 Charles and Ray Eames made Glimpses of the U.S.A. for the American National Exhibition in Moscow. The Eames Foundation says it showed more than 2,200 images. They ran on seven screens, each 20 x 30 ft, inside Buckminster Fuller's dome.

The subject was ordinary. It was one day of American life, shown to a Soviet audience. The idea came from reading that audience and the politics of the Cold War. It did not come from a visual trend.

Sixty-two years later, Es Devlin built the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. She based it on Stephen Hawking's Breakthrough Message project. That project asked what humanity would say to another civilization. Each visitor gave a word. A machine-learning model, adapted with thousands of curated poems, made shared poems from the words. The poems were shown on the front of the building (Dezeen).

In both rooms the form makes no sense without the idea. The Eameses brought film, politics and sociology into a dome. Devlin brought physics, poetry and machine learning to a facade. The craft is superb, and it serves the reading.

Why event designers stop reading

The causes are built into the work. Timelines are short. Pitches are won on mood boards pulled from social feeds. Awards are judged from photos.

Briefs arrive as a list of parts, such as a stage, a bar and a photo moment. They rarely arrive as a message. Each of these is Bierut's portfolio school under another name. The work is judged by the image it leaves, not the idea it carries. Clients reward it too. A mood board is easy to approve, and a photo is easy to share.

A reading list for room-makers

Bierut's cure was to read outside design. Each of these twelve books teaches one lesson. A designer of rooms can use it on the next job.

• Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960): People find their way by paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. A legible venue offers all five.
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Busy places stay busy because of mixed uses and many eyes. A dead corner needs a reason to visit.
• Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (1966): Intimate, personal, social and public distance. Size tables and lounges for the conversation you want.
• William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980): People sit where there is somewhere to sit, and they gather where other people are.
• Christopher Alexander and others, A Pattern Language (1977): Recurring problems have recurring solutions, and naming them lets a team design together.
• Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963): A color changes with its neighbors. Judge finishes under the event's own light.
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958): Houses, corners and doors carry feeling. The threshold of a room is a design decision.
• Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956): Front stage and back stage. Guests should never see the back stage by accident.
• Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (1990): Dense information stays clear when it is layered and separated. Apply it to maps and signs.
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): Memory keeps the peak and the end of an experience. Design both.
• Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (2008): Making is a form of thinking, and skill grows with judgment.
• Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (2007): A designer's best material comes from outside design.

Two of these books have essays of their own in this series. Read Kevin Lynch and why guests get lost and a pattern language for events.

Start the brief with a sentence

Before any sketch, write the room's sentence. Three questions produce it.

1. Who is in the room?
2. What do they believe walking in?
3. What should they believe walking out?

Write the answer as one line. "[Guests] arrive believing [X] and leave believing [Y], because the room [does Z]." Then check every element on the plan against it.

• Carries the sentence: Keep
• Supports comfort or safety: Keep
• Is decoration only: Cut it, or justify it in one line

It is the same order of work behind form follows function.

But clients want pretty

Clients pay for beauty, but they remember meaning. A photo moment is fine when it says something only this host could say. Bierut is not against craft. He practices it with great care. And good design builds goodwill only when the craft carries an idea. The cure he gave was curiosity, and it costs nothing but time.

Bierut asks what a room says before how it looks. Monet draws a to-scale layout from a venue plan and a brief in minutes, so a team spends less time drawing and more time on that harder question.