■1: Nice
Cool and Nice are opposites
There’s a type of table that seems to be floating, called a tensegrity table.
I think tensegrity tables are cool, but I don’t want one at home. I think that every time I’m about to set down a coffee cup on it, I would halt for a second.
I don’t want my things to challenge me like that. I have enough challenges with work and family and keeping my house plants alive. I like my objects to be obvious and comfortable. So as you can imagine, I don’t like most modern architecture.
Much of modern architecture wants to be a tensegrity table—a cool concept that halts your brain. I don’t think most people like it, but architects are bored of normal buildings.
It happens to all design professions. Veteran hair dressers have horizontal hair styles. Veteran fashion designers make plastic bag dresses. They’re bored of normal.
It happened to me recently. I got bored of 3D design and tried to innovate on live stream twice. The following reprimand is meant for myself:
It doesn’t have to be cool.
Like with my coffee table, it’s okay to just be nice. As professionals, we should fight our inclination to make everything weirder and more interesting just because we’re bored. Everyone else isn’t bored yet, it’s just you.
The problem with cool is that it’s the opposite of nice. I believe the two are literally incompatible.
Cool surprises you. It challenges your ideas of what this thing could be. It draws attention to its design. It’s conceptual and makes you think.
Nice feels comfortable. It embodies the archetype of what a thing is. It blends into the background. It is obvious how it’s supposed to be used.
In 3D design, I love cool. But I'm starting to love nice too. And I’m becoming aware that I have to pick one.
Tutorial: How to make “nice”
I keep referring to this book. Just because I can’t find anything that gets even close when it comes to designing nice.
Inspiration: Nice designs
I don’t have any great sources of nice designs. Would love to know if you have any on Substack.
Tip: Behind! Copy any image
The Behind browser extension lets you copy any image on any website.
Really nice way to put it. As an architect by training, I absolutely get what you’re saying, and I think that this shift of though (making nice instead of cool buildings) is happening at a generational level. Maybe architects are now « bored » of « cool » buildings. Personally, I think the « wow effect » achieved in a cool building doesn’t last long. Once it’s over, your cool building tends to be forgotten if it wasn’t the first of its kind. I think nice buildings are timeless. To go further, I’d say when you make a cool building - in the sense of making it surprising, giving it the « wow effect » talked about earlier - it often comes to the price of great efforts, which often means a waste of material. So I’d say making something nice with an economy of means and timelessness is pretty hard, probably even harder than making something cool. Since 3D is a pretty new form of art, I think we’re still in the « cool » era, and I’m wondering what an economic and timeless render will look like, but I think we’ll figure it ou pretty soon! Anyway sorry for this architecture geek stuff! Thanks for the nice read and have great day!
As an industrial designer, I think you really hit the spot. by the way, your livestream was nice.... and wonderful xD.