MESSES & PROCESSES

PREFACE:

I’m a very poor multitasker, I can’t entertain more than one thought train at a time. But I’m intrigued by a great many things at once, which results in me moving from one thought to the next very quickly, without fully resolving any one before I move on. This is very messy thinking and leaves a lot of open ends. Messy, unresolved, crude things are often considered ugly, especially to the designer, so I believe the best way for me to resolve the ‘ugly’ things I have made is to resolve my thoughts on ugliness itself.

UGLINESS IS INSTINCT:

Revulsion is a thoughtless action, an immediate response to something. It’s absolutely instinctual in nature, an evolutionary leftover intended to keep an individual safe from sources of potential sickness: the ill, rotting food, filth, etc.

Identifying ugliness is also an evolutionary guide to finding an appropriate mate to throw genetic material at, or rather, who not to. Attraction, while heavily influenced by an individual’s culture, is very much based on your mechanics: biology and chemistry.

Universally admired are those hose we deem to be at the peak of health. And though those standards fluctuate from place to place, they generally include the same characteristics that are considered healthy in that area or era.

So, it follows that those we as a culture typically find ‘unappealing’ are the physically unfit, the disabled, the too-old, the too-young. People that aren’t considered prime biological examples. At its roots, it’s a method of identifying who you don’t want to pass on your genes with.

UGLINESS IS CULTURAL:

However, there is an interesting turnabout that glorifies the opposite. “You can be fat and be beautiful. You can be hairy and be beautiful. You can be disabled, you can be scarred and disfigured,” seems to be the mantra today.

And though I question why we place so much of a person’s worth on their aesthetics – inventing reasons for beauty rather than saying “no, this person is not attractive by any of our social definitions, but that does not mean they are without value, nor that they have no place in our community” – I understand it is a rejection of that same system. In a social system that connotes value with what is aesthetically pleasing, you sometimes need to uses that same currency.

In that context, I wonder about our role as designers. Are we battling that cultural stigma or are we perpetuating it in our desire to make ‘good looking shit?’ Is that a bad thing?

UGLINESS IS TRANSMITABLE:

Ugliness by association is an interesting thought – can things be contaminated by the undesirable? Certainly this is true for transmittable diseases and physical filth, but what about ugly qualities? How about this – would you associate yourself with someone you thought to be ugly? Or would you create intentional distance, so as not to be associated with that individual and the unappealing characteristics connected to them?  

Can you catch an ugly personality?

From a personal standpoint, when I am disgusted with an individual – truly repulsed by their ugly personality – I am often disgusted by those that actively associate with them. As if they were some kind of social Typhoid Mary, I will consider their influence a viral contaminant. I feel as though that willingness to ally yourself to someone that acts in a abhorrent way in some way means you endorse their actions. A lack of objection sometimes functions as a method of approval.

Which is perhaps why some people are so vocal about their dislike for things they consider distasteful: they don’t want to risk an association with it whatsoever. It can make some issues very polarized, when not enough disapproval can be construed as an endorsement.

UGLINESS IS UNCOMFORTABLE:

Of course, as was mentioned earlier, ugliness is as much a social construct as it is an evolutionary creation. To decide something is ugly – incongruent with personal philosophies on physical and ethical aesthetics – is to make a judgment. And though we make judgment calls every day, there is something to be said about the overly judgmental. Socially we condemn the disapproving, negative individuals who “seem to have a comment about everything.”

In a way, considering something ugly can make you a little ugly, which is an uncomfortable and guilty possibility. But where is the line between being judgmental and being critical? Certainly, the distinctions between the two are uncomfortably few, but the fact that there is a distinction beyond semantics is important for the student designer, especially in the context of critique. We need to know the difference in making an educated judgment and making an impulsive judgment.

UGLINESS IS A CONCLUSION:

It would be poor form to set out to resolve something and leave it open-ended, so let me summarize and finalize.