Legend has it that on September 15, 1956, Design became an honest—to—goodness business. Since then people who design, or manage design, or sell design, have been wondering what they can do to convince decision makers that good design is worth what it costs.

So far as we know, there has never been much question about the value of good design for those of us who make our livings from it. For us the value of good design is sort of a self evident truth, like all men are created equal or, it’s better to be rich and thin, than poor and overweight.

In the outside world, however, things may be different. It has long been rumored that some of the people who run things actually prefer automobiles made in Detroit to those made in West Germany and the architecture of the local Holiday Inn to the Seagrams building.

If these rumors are true, we have a serious problem on our hands. Because this means we are not simply dealing with the need to justify costs to skeptical management. The more difficult problem is that the people who ultimately must sign our checks may believe that good design is, in fact, elitist and unresponsive to what people want.

Of course, there are a few companies that see good design as a central pillar of their business strategy. You know who they are. It shows. Their products are clean and uncluttered. Their ads are usually straightforward and effective. Their trademarks are frequently contemporary. The buildings they inhabit are often distinguished.

Some of these “elite” companies are committed to good design because it is integral to their culture; others simply because a senior manager thinks it’s important. The reasons they support the function are as different as the organizations and the people involved. In our experience, however, two motives seem to surface most frequently.

A commitment to excellence. The deluge of the books on the subject of excellence in recent years have threatened to trivialize the concept and relegate it to the dusty archives where all of last year’s fads and clichés reside. Too bad.

The CEO of one of our clients, now retired, once said, “I’m not smart enough to always know what’s most important so I take the view that everything is equally important. Frequently, I am accused of placing too much emphasis on minor matters. But I have never been accused of not caring enough about the things that really matter.”

Coming from a gifted manager that explanation is both shrewd and attractively self-deprecating. But the fact is that he knew something about excellence that the books failed to adequately establish. It is this: Excellence, buy its very nature, is not selective. You are either committed to it or you ain’t.

The importance of Design as a Marketing tool. Probably the most powerful use of good design occurs when a company uses it to separate itself, its products, its services from the competition. This is only possible because there is so little good design out there or conversely, so much that is bad or mediocre. Isn’t it ironic. that if the general level of design were better, this powerful strategy wouldn’t work?

It was PT. Barnum, the showman and social commentator, who was reputed to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” And there have been generations of marketing people who have accepted that aphorism as their creed.

Fortunately in recent years more companies and their leaders have been willing to listen to David Ogilvy’s advice. He said, “The consumer is not a dummy, she is your wife.”

But the rhetorical question with which we began still remains unanswered. Why Design? Here, at great risk, are our answers.

1. Design is a marketing tool that can make your company, products and services distinctive.
2. Design is a manifestation of excellence that is visible.
3. Over time it will encourage superior performance across the boards.
4. It makes an important contribution to improving the quality of our culture.
5. And it makes many of us feel good.

Maybe the best answer, certainly the most succinct, belongs to Thomas Watson. On September 15, 1956, he said:

“Good design is good business.”

by Saul Bass

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

It is indisputably evident that a great part of every man's life, must be employed in collecting materials for the exercise of genius. Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing: he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.

A student unacquainted with the attempts of former adventures is always apt to over-rate this own abilities; to mistake the most trifling excursions for discoveries of moment, and every coast new to him for a new-found country. If by chance he passes beyond his usual limits, he congratulates his own arrival at those regions which they who have steered a better course have long left behind them.

The productions of such minds are seldom distinguished by an air of originality: they are anticipated in their happiest efforts; and if they are found to differ in anything from their predecessors, it is only in irregular sallies and trifling conceits. The more extensive, therefore, your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention; and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Essay by Norman Cousins

Anyone with a passion for hanging labels on people or things should have little difficulty in recognizing that an apt tag for our time is the Unkempt generation. I am not referring solely to college kids. The sloppiness virus has spread to all sectors of society. People go to all sorts of trouble and expense to look uncombed, unshaved, unpressed.

The symbol of the times is blue jeans-not just blue jeans in good condition but jeans that are frayed, tom, discolored. They don’t get that way naturally. No one wants blue jeans that are crisply clean or spanking new. Manufacturers recognize a big market when they see it, and they compete with one another to offer jeans that are made to look as though they’ve just been discarded by clumsy house painters after ten years of wear. The more faded and seemingly ancient the garment, the higher the cost. Disheveled is in fashion; neatness is obsolete.

Nothing is wrong with comfortable clothing. It's just that current usage is more reflective of a slavish conformity than a desire for ease. No generation has strained harder than ours to affect a casual, relaxed, cool look; none has succeeded more spectacularly in looking as though it had been stamped out by cookie cutters. The attempt to avoid any appearance of being well groomed or even neat has a quality of desperation about it and suggests a calculated and phony deprivation. We shun conventionality, but we put on a uniform to do it. An appearance of alienation is the triumphant goal, to be pursued in oversize sweaters and muddy sneakers.

Slovenly speech comes off the same spool. Vocabulary, like blue jeans, is being drained of color and distinction. A complete sentence in everyday speech is as rare as a man's tie in the swank Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. People communicate in chopped-up phrases relying on grunts and chants of “you know” or “I mean” to cover up a damnable incoherence. Neatness should be no less important in language than it is in dress. But spew and sprawl are taking over. The English language is one of the greatest sources of wealth in the world. In the midst of accessible riches, we are linguistic paupers.

Violence in language has become almost as casual as the possession of handguns. The curious notion has taken hold that emphasis in communicating is impossible without the incessant use of four-letter words. Some screenwriters openly admit that they are careful not to turn in scripts that are devoid of foul language lest the classification office impose the curse of a G (general) rating. Motion-picture exhibitors have a strong preference for the R (restricted) rating, probably on the theory of forbidden fruit. Hence writers and producers have every incentive to employ tasteless language and gory scenes.

The effect is to foster attitudes of casualness toward violence and brutality not just in entertainment but in everyday life. People are not as uncomfortable as they ought to be about the glamorization of human hurt. The ability to react instinctively to suffering seems to be atrophying. Youngsters sit transfixed in front of television or motion-picture screens, munching popcorn while human beings are battered or mutilated. Nothing is more essential in education than respect for the frailty of human beings; nothing is more characteristic of the age than mindless violence.

Everything I have learned about the educational process convinces me that the notion that children can outgrow casual attitudes toward brutality is wrong. Count on it: if you saturate young minds with materials showing that human beings are fit subjects for debasement or dismembering, the result will be desensitization to everything that should produce revulsion or resistance. The first aim of education is to develop respect for life, just as the highest expression of civilization is the supreme tenderness that people are strong enough to feel and manifest toward one another. If society is breaking down, as it too often appears to be, it is not because we lack the brainpower to meet its demands but because our feelings are so dulled that we don't recognize we have a problem.

Untidiness in dress, speech and emotions is readily connected to human relationships. The problem with the casual sex so fashionable in films is not that it arouses lust but that it deadens feelings and annihilates privacy. The danger is not that sexual exploitation will create sex fiends but that it may spawn eunuchs. People who have the habit of seeing everything and doing anything run the risk of feeling nothing.

My purpose here is not to make a case for a Victorian decorum or for namby-pambyism. The argument is directed to bad dress, bad manners, bad speech, bad human relationships. The hope has to be that calculated sloppiness will run its course. Who knows, perhaps some of the hip designers may discover they can make a fortune by creating fashions that are unfrayed and that grace the human form. Similarly, motion-picture and television producers and exhibitors may realize that a substantial audience exists for something more appealing to the human eye and spirit than the sight of a human being hurled through a store-front window or tossed off a penthouse terrace. There might even be a salutary response to films that dare to show people expressing genuine love and respect for one another in more convincing ways than anonymous clutching and thrashing about.

Finally, our schools might encourage the notion that few things are more rewarding than genuine creativity, whether in the clothes we wear, the way we communicate the nurturing of human relationships or how we locate the best in ourselves and put it to work.

Norman Cousins, formerly editor of the Saturday Review is a faculty member of the School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles, working in the field of psychoneuroimmunology.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.