Should sustainability be beautiful?
A reflection on the importance of natural beauty and why it's not superficial
When I was growing up, my parents bought me a book from a motorway service station about classic American car designs. If I remember correctly, the book was called ‘American Dream Machines’ and it lived up to its name. Full of colour photographs and illustrations of vehicles from the golden era of the American auto industry in the 50s and 60s, it captured my imagination and my heart.
Today, I look around at cars on the road and I'm hard pushed to find any that feel like real love was put into their design, even among the premium brands. You might think that this doesn't really matter and that car's are bad for the environment anyway, but I think it's symptomatic of a bigger trend in Western society, in which we are forgetting the difference between real beauty and superficial appearances, or what I refer to as “Plastic Beauty”.
They might guzzle gasoline, but large numbers of those old American classic cars are still on the roads today, lovingly maintained by their owners and putting smiles on people's faces wherever they go. In contrast, most modern cars are completely forgettable and will be sent to the scrap heap without a second thought as soon as the repair bills start to mount up. In fact, many people won’t even keep their car long enough to get a repair bill, with 20-30% of new cars in the UK today being leased for just a few years. Like with mobile phones, their owners are encouraged to upgrade to the next shiny model almost as soon as that new car smell has worn off.
My concern is that as our society gets increasingly hypnotized by superficial beauty, we’re not just getting sucked into the machine of capitalism, we're forgetting what real beauty is.
A little while back, I had a great discussion with a colleague about what we should include in a set of principles for designing a more humane internet. I wanted to include beauty as a core principle, but my colleague disagreed on the basis that it would be misinterpreted by modern web designers as meaning “sexy”. I sadly had to agree, but yet I still felt that we needed to try to communicate the importance of real beauty.
If we reject beauty as an important aspect of sustainable design, there’s a risk that instead of creating a world of beauty, creativity, joy and inspiration, we’ll create a monotonous, utilitarian dystopia in the name of sustainability. Does anyone really want that?
This isn’t a new problem. When Vineeta and I started Wholegrain in 2007, we actually launched it as a sustainable branding agency called ‘Scamper’, recognising the need to help positive organisations communicate their inner beauty through their outward communications. We quickly pivoted into being a web design agency (a conversation for another day) but the core philosophy never changed and we’ve tried to bring both an inner and outer beauty to everything we’ve worked on over the years.
Too often, environmentally conscious companies avoid making their brands and products truly beautiful, either because beauty is not something that they consider important, or because they believe that design is superficial and therefore a part of the problem of our materialistic consumer culture. I've always disagreed with this line of thinking, as I believe that the choice between making things sustainable and making them beautiful is a false dichotomy arising from us misunderstanding the nature of beauty.
The nature of beauty is that nature is beautiful.
Whether it be a flower, a fruit, a sunset, a night sky, a river, a bird or a snow capped mountain top, beauty is everywhere in the natural world. It is nature’s way of communicating that there is an underlying harmony, order and love inherent in the cosmos. Nature is not fickle, vain or superficial, and yet it is filled with exquisite beauty.
If sustainable design is about designing a world in harmony with nature then surely it should follow that everything we design should be beautiful. And yet there is a hesitancy in the sustainability world to embrace beauty, as if we don’t trust ourselves to not get corrupted by the temptations of material desire. The exceptions often swing the other way, diving head first into embracing superficial beauty in the race to compete with mainstream brands.
I think this stems from a culture in which we have forgotten what real beauty is and so cant even see it as an option. If we remember the truth of true beauty then we can once again embrace it wholeheartedly in everything that we do. It's hard to describe exactly what that truth is in words, but I do believe that we can feel it.
Real beauty makes us feel love, whereas superficial beauty makes us feel lust. We feel real beauty in our hearts and superficial beauty in our pants. True beauty is long lasting, possibly even growing with time as our relationship deepens, whether it be with a person, a place or an object. Superficial beauty on the other hand is short lived, beginning with a spike of excitement and desire, but fading over time and often quickly disappearing altogether, like those products you were so excited to buy but now exist as unloved junk in a drawer.
True beauty is an expression of love.
Of course, it is because of this that true beauty is not just about aesthetics, but about the love that is infused into the very essence of something and therefore radiates from its core. The ideas, the hopes, the care and the creativity behind things all have beauty that we can feel and we must allow that to be expressed to its full potential, unfiltered by our environmentalist fears. True beauty is holistic beauty, with no bad parts.
William Morris famously said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” and I'd extend this by saying that we should aspire to live in a world in which everything is both. Of course, as Morris eludes to, beauty is subjective, but the common factor in natural beauty is that you can feel the love. Even if not everything appeals equally to everyone, the world is a better place when we create things from the heart.
There’s no doubt in my mind that superficial beauty does play a major role in fuelling consumerism, but I don’t think the same is true of real beauty. I actually believe that creating things of true beauty can have the opposite effect. Beautiful design leaves us feeling fulfilled and satiated, unlike superficial design that leaves us feeling empty and hungry for the next fix of ‘Buy Now’. If we make things truly beautiful, we will actually buy less and care more for the things that we do buy.
As designers, finding the line between true beauty and superficial beauty is certainly not an easy task, especially as we are constantly at the mercy of our own fickle temptations, but if we focus on tuning in to our hearts and following our intuition, we’ll know if we are on the right track.
All of this is to say that sustainable design should mirror nature not just in it’s engineering genius and circularity of resources, but in the beauty that it contributes to the world.
Putting it into practice
This topic of beauty and sustainability has been on my mind a lot in recent months as I worked on the design of our modern version of Gyan Chaupar, the spiritual game of Snakes & Ladders. As I described in my previous post, the project began when I stumbled upon an old Jain game of Snakes & Ladders in a museum in Mumbai and was captivated by it. It was a thing of beauty that just like a beautiful flower or landscape, connected with something deep inside me and told me that it was good. It grabbed my attention and captured my heart.
When creating our own version of the game, I was deeply aware of the need to make it a thing of true beauty and not just superficially beautiful. Every detail of the game, including many subtle features in the layout of the board, the iconography used to represent aspects of life and even hidden messaging within the design was created as a labour of love.
From a graphic design point of view, I have to admit that I had a heavy dose of imposter syndrome in this project, having been ‘off the tools’ for several years, but I hope that I made up for it with genuine love and passion. When considering the typography, the spacing, the colour palette, the paper, the ink and the overarching graphic style, Vineeta and I tried to create something that was infused with our love and would connect with people on a deeper level. We also tried to make it resonate with people now, yet also be timeless enough to be loved for years to come. Whether we hit the mark is not for me to say, but I guess time will tell.
A few final ‘ifs’
If you enjoyed this post, please do share the love by passing it on, posting on your social network or leaving a comment. ❤️
If you’re interesting in our spiritual game of Snakes & Ladders, you can read the back story in last week’s post and buy a copy for yourself or a gift for a loved one at www.gyanchaupar.co.uk
If you are interested in this topic, you might enjoy reading my earlier post asking ‘Is materialism really such a bad thing?’
If you got this far, big thanks. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Just want to say that VWs ID Buzz is a good-looking vehicle.
We have a portmanteau in Swedish "villhöver" (a combination of "vill", or "want", and "behöver", or "need"). I villhöver a Buzz, but going to keep my biogas Volvo unless my family outgrows it.
Nicely voiced as always Tom. When I set Leap up I was a bit bored of the hair shirt/hessian approach of Sustainability while at Eden. So I aimed for sustainability to be a sexy surprise and that everything from our studio to our work had a story, had meaning, and curiosity. Yes, sometimes its good to honor the roots where a paper like the beautiful Khadi would work for some projects. But others like our desks at Leap were beautiful, affordable, eco, and built to last with no nuts and bolts to wear away. So good that many of our clients including Bedruthan took up the same furniture after visiting us.
On beautiful business, 100% yes beauty in everything. I noted that at the recent B Corp Louder than Words that Mary Portas had stolen (perhaps) the pioneering work of Alan Moore https://beautiful.business/
As always your words are stimulating and one of the few things I read let alone respond.
Keep up the goodness x