Why I Don't Think Good Design Should Be Comfortable

We have become very fond of the word "comfortable."

Comfortable homes.

Comfortable clothing.

Comfortable furniture.

Comfortable interfaces.

Comfortable lives.

There is nothing wrong with comfort. I enjoy it myself, particularly when it involves a quiet room, cold air and nobody asking me to participate in whatever fresh catastrophe humanity has invented that afternoon.

But comfort and good design are not the same thing.

Sometimes good design should make you notice something.

A texture.

A sound.

A change in temperature.

A strange pattern.

A shadow moving across a wall.

The smell of wet soil.

The roughness of bark.

The weight of a material in your hand.

The shape of a stone.

Nature is full of these small interruptions.

A forest does not optimize itself for our convenience.

The ground is uneven.

Branches cross paths.

Thorns exist.

Insects make noise.

Water changes direction.

Leaves decay.

Things die.

New things emerge from what died.

None of this is particularly convenient.

And yet our brains are extraordinarily good at paying attention to environments that contain variation.

This is one reason I am suspicious of spaces designed to be perfectly smooth, perfectly predictable and perfectly controlled.

When every surface is the same, every temperature is the same, every sound is suppressed and every visual element has been flattened into the same sanitized language, there is very little left to discover.

The environment becomes background.

And when the environment becomes background, we stop relating to it.

I think good design should occasionally interrupt that process.

Not with chaos for the sake of chaos.

Not by making a space unpleasant.

But by giving people something worth noticing.

A window positioned so that sunlight changes across the room.

A material that reveals its grain.

A courtyard where the vegetation changes through the seasons.

A path that bends instead of revealing everything at once.

Water that can be heard before it is seen.

A garden designed for insects rather than merely photographed by humans.

A pattern inspired by biology without pretending to be biology.

These things create relationship.

They remind us that the environment is not simply the container surrounding our lives.

It participates in them.

That idea matters to BIO.PRINTS because I don't think objects should exist merely to fill space.

A pair of shoes is still an object.

But objects can carry ideas.

They can make us notice color.

Pattern.

Texture.

Movement.

Scale.

The strange geometry of a flower.

The architecture of a forest floor.

The veins of a leaf.

The mineral structure of stone.

The movement of water.

The darkness between trees.

The enormous distance between stars.

A good object does not have to explain all of this.

Sometimes it simply needs to make you look twice.

That second glance is important.

Because attention is where relationship begins.

And perhaps that is one of the simplest forms of design we have forgotten.

Make something worth noticing.

Then let the noticing do the rest.