A good hammer is valuable because it is useful, and not because it is well designed. Wait a minute. You might say, “Isn’t it useful because it was designed that way?” Yes, it was designed to be useful, but it’s valuable not because it was designed, but because it is useful. In other words, it would be valuable even if it wasn’t designed, and yet it was somehow, by accident, useful.
Assuming that the value or meaning of the object is derived from its usefulness and not from the fact that it was designed, there isn’t an immutable link between an object’s original design and its actual value.
But how about the Magic Mouse by Apple or Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer? Aren’t those objects of design valuable because they were designed, rather than because of their actual usefulness? Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer is objectively worse at squeezing lemons than a $2 alternative, but still sells for hundreds of dollars.
It is because these objects hold symbolic, aesthetic, or cultural value. In this case, design is not a vehicle for utility, but for meaning or status. These items function more like art than tools.
Their worth is derived from:
Aesthetic appeal (beauty or form)
Provenance (who designed them)
Cultural capital (possession of one signals taste or wealth)
Collectibility (like art, their rarity or origin boosts their worth)
But what does it all mean?
At the heart of it, it’s about the boundary between design and art: when does an object stop being a designed thing and start becoming a piece of art — the distinction between instrumental value and symbolic or aesthetic value, and the often misunderstood relationship between design intent and actual value.
A hammer is valuable because it is useful, not because it was designed. This gets at instrumental value — the kind of value derived from what an object does, not from what it is. A rock that happens to be good at hammering nails might be just as valuable as a crafted hammer, even if it wasn’t “designed.” The design is merely a pathway to usefulness, not the source of value itself.
On the other hand, symbolic or aesthetic value is derived from something else. A Starck’s juicer is valuable because it represents something, not because it provides utility well.
Instrumental vs symbolic value of design
So we end up with two distinct pathways to value:
Instrumental Value → Design serves usefulness (e.g., hammers, apps, bicycles) and becomes tool Symbolic Value → Design serves meaning (e.g., art pieces, fashion, collectibles) and becomes art
Now here it where things get complex. Some objects of design straddle both worlds:
A designer lamp that gives terrible light but looks stunning.
A fashion garment that’s nearly unwearable but seen as high art.
A museum piece like the Starck juicer, which functions as both a consumer object and a sculpture.
For these kind of objects, even though designed, their primary value is symbolic. They carry the form of design and the function of art. Like the iPhone, which is both highly useful and a cultural symbol.
The key takeaway
Design is not inherently valuable — it’s valuable when it produces usefulness or meaning. And these are two very different currencies of value.
A hammer is valuable because it works.
A Starck juicer is valuable because it represents something.
When usefulness drops away, and meaning becomes the primary currency, we’re no longer in the realm of practical design — we’re entering the domain of design-as-art or conceptual design. This tension — between design as problem-solving and design as expression — is central to many debates in modern design discourse. It’s why Dieter Rams despised overly ornamental objects, and why others celebrate them.
If somebody came to you and claimed that their weight was a nice green colour, you would probably stop, double-check if you heard them correctly, and then wonder if that person was sane. What a piece of nonsense!
Just because something sounds like a sentence and has the structure of a sentence doesn’t mean it must automatically have meaning.
And yet, in the corporate world, we often hear busy white-collar professionals utter similar kinds of nonsense.
“Let’s dockerize the monolith to make it cloud-native.” Sure, and while we’re at it, let’s staple a horse to a spaceship to make it more agile.
Or when Mike from Innovation Labs calls for “leveraging blockchain to democratize synergy.” That’s just a pile of nouns desperately trying to form a startup pitch.
But in the entrepreneurial world of wannabe innovators, sentences like these get nodded at, printed on slides, and repeated in meetings without a hint of irony.
“We need to action this ask.” You mean… do the thing someone asked for? Why not just say that?
In linguistics, sentences like these are usually described as category mistakes (or category errors).
If you are like me, you must be familiar with that feeling of frustration when scrolling through the “infinite” list of your past conversations with ChatGPT, looking for the particular one you want to re-check again, just to realise that you can’t find it — at least, not quickly and without a significant effort. One summer afternoon, I started ideating on the concept of a better prompt archive management.
I asked myself: “How could we improve the usability of our beloved AI tool?”
There are many possible areas of improvement when it comes to software as young as ChatGPT was in 2023. This post is about of them — the better prompt archive management. I contemplated the idea of what if we gave users an option to organise their past conversations with ChatGPT somehow? Not just archive them but also group and tag them in meaningful-to-them ways.
Have you ever wondered why some logomarks resonate with customers while others do not?
We all know, that some logos are considered to be inspirational works of art while most of them are average at best. Recently, I wrote a short article on the proposition density in design and how it relates to memorability of famous logos (and other works of art).
In summary: I believe that the success of many well-known logos has a lot to do with the relationship between the elements they are made of and the meaning these elements convey — in other words, the proposition density, which could be defined as the amount of information conveyed in an object or environment per unit element.
Colour is one of the most underestimated yet critical areas of design, especially when designing with accessibility in mind.
Most designers are familiar with the colour contrast of texts on the background. However, there is much more to colours in relation to accessibility. We have rules for link colour vs text colour, focus state, adjacent colours for UI elements and interface elements that convey information, etc.
“Colour contrast is one of the areas where we designers can have a significant impact on accessibility. While accessibility is much more than that, a series of measurable variables make colour contrast one of the perhaps easier aspects to address.”
— Javier Cuello
The WCAG guidelines, while comprehensive, are not necessarily easy to follow. Luckily, we can learn from folks like Javier Cuello, who summarised the important colour-related accessibility requirements in a more digestible form.
In his article, Javier explains key considerations that designers should keep in mind when dealing with colours. The article is a good read for anyone looking for an easy-to-understand introduction to colour contrast and accessibility.
If I learned one absolute statement in the past 20+ years of practicing the craft of digital design is that anyone trying to make absolute statements about almost anything is doomed to be proven wrong at some point.
