But does a depression love the design?

"The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case duringthe Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings."

This is an excerpt taken from the article Design Loves a Depression in Sunday's New York Times. I found it especially interesting because 1). all I can think of lately is white space and how it manifests itself in various design disciplines; and 2). I am currently reading de Botton's "The Architecture of Happiness". In it, he writes of Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House, its plethora of construction problems and how, when finished, its form didn't follow function as much as it actually created undesirable ones; i.e., the flat, and therefore leaky, roof.

In terms of white space and how it's affected by function, there is also an emotional component to white space. In other words, white space exists in design not only in its physical (think architecture) and visual (think graphic design) manifestations, but in psychological ones as well (this I believe, is most relevant to industrial design). Psychological manifestations of white space arise when a product minimizes cognitive load, providing a mental white space, if you will. The product is user-friendly, the user experience seamless and enjoyable, leaving the user's mind free to attend to other things. In the design of nuclear power plant control panels, heavy machinery, or cockpit interfaces, this mental white space can mean the difference between life and death.

When a product is ill-designed in one aspect or another, as was the Tugendhat House (well-designed visually, but poorly engineered), and there is not enough mental white space, then the whole product suffers. Which is why there is so much promise in NUIs (Natural User Interfaces). That key word "natural" is what allows for more mental white space. Which I'll write more about later after I've had a chance to read and think some more….