"Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once."—Ralph Waldo Emerson
An enduring quality of craftsmanship is recognizability. Sometimes we need to squint, but even among fakes it's a truth among our many lies.
I don't believe the reason is economic or even cultural.
We don't defend a great work of art for its technical use of oils, but rather what such a utility of oils might emphasize and potentially express.
When we ask, "What does this mean?" we're not really asking what the work might've accomplished. I see the painting of a Golden Retriever.
Rather, we are asking, "How are we supposed to feel?"
Modern software development has an unfortunate physics envy, where most engineers have committed to the schema, form follows function.
The bulk of software products are graphically developed for their usability, with what seems to be design lathered on top like a cheap cream.
This is further exacerbated by foaming capital markets.
Hyper-financialization means every skeuomorph is a copy of a previous skeuomorph, where each startup is an inception of some "request for startup." I often hear "there's only going to be one winner," as if founders had no say.
Yes, most things are small, few are enormous, but still.
Our industry fails to inspire anyone who works outside of it, and this is by design. The craft and intention the greatest engineers and designers invest into products don't feel like anything. They're not moving, reflective; beautiful.
There's a tensile strength in luxury from craft to beauty.
We should be able to follow a tense thread from what the artist felt when they made it to how we feel when we use it. To inspire, it isn't enough to focus on the performance of the materials. A great product is encapsulated virtue.
This is why luxury occupies a positioning in our minds.
Imitations of luxury goods exist, and do deceive, but there's something distinguishing and discerned, otherworldly, about the real thing.
I think this has something to do with what the real thing represents. I don't mean the luxury brand; rather, what a good brand identifies.
There are no luxury brands, only branded luxuries.
The Birkin is a representation of the comfort Jane Birkin wanted to experience when carrying a handbag, one that might contain scripts and diapers for her then two-year-old daughter, Lou.
Here, luxury meant comfort, not the keen and exceptional quality of Hermès' stitching.
A good brand isn't good at "branding," so much as gift wrapping how we'd like to feel. The paperboard box, even the object of desire inside, is a red herring. The real gift is a feeling, what's created inside us.
What we feel after consuming luxury is the brand.
Good brands are presents containing better versions of feelings we've had before. This is saying little of great brands that might introduce us to feelings we've never felt, and didn't even know we had possessed.
Great brands curate feelings like fine gemstones, as they are the real jewels of luxury.
And there are very few great brands.
It's difficult to capture and bottle up that feeling a consumer desires, such that when they consume your thing they emerge a different person. They can only feel that way, become their true form, because of your product.
If they can't reproduce the product, they can't reproduce the feeling.
The cloak-and-dagger to creating luxury experiences is learning how to transport a person from a hovel of insecurity to a palace of charisma.
Most of us, unfortunately, are insecure about some thing.
The best experiences make us feel more secure. It's a kind of spellbinding magic that encourages someone to feel as good about you as you should feel about yourself. I've always appreciated elegance in others, for these reasons.
Such people are a species of luxury product that make us feel powerful.
Elegant people are not necessarily well-spoken, or decorated in Mongolian cashmere turtlenecks on Bond Street. Elegance first and foremost is the luxury to move and act as oneself, at one's best. This is the craft of authenticity.
The best of who you are should be reliably on display, because you made the choice to live from your deepest truth and discovered it's the enviable way to live.
Successful people make better choices than other people.
This is why success and what people call elegance are often associated. Of course, you can succeed being an ugly person. People do, but only elegance endures.
No one likes the popular rich person who never learned to process trauma and instead created a personality out of it. It might seem that way, but these people make for good television, not good company.
Elegant people seem true and give us energy rather than taking energy from us. Think of your favorite celebrity or politician. It's nearly impossible to draw a contour around their utility, and yet this is what gives them pricing power.
In the end, it's what makes us feel power listening to them.
You only need to do a beautiful thing once, because the virtue a beauty captures is not cyclical or subjective. The virtue is durable, even if and when the products attempting to capture the virtue, again, function in an unfamiliar form.
Ultimately, you need to obsess over the truth, not the utility.
The idea that 'business is not art' has pushed more than one builder into the uncanny valley of infinite iterations. It's an evolutionary process that chops, bends, slues, leaps, until it has some high-functioning form that fails to retain.
It's like a shower after intense exercise that wouldn't take.
Ironically, when art is downstream from business, business becomes the art. Beauty is subject to utility and the only things we should feel are "not cold" or "not hungry." It's a work culture where low productivity growth is the norm.
However, this isn't how you make things that reduce churn.
We should be asking 'how might the user feel?' for no other reason than to escape the grinding mill work of trying to understand their intentions.
We should only need to understand the user tendency once.