Design Is Not A Luxury with Wendover Productions | Squarespace Values (Ep. 6)

When you hear the word design, what image pops into your head? For me, it's expensive, fancy furniture, but maybe for you it's a supercar or an elegant building. What I almost guarantee didn't pop into your head was a paperclip or a lightbulb or a stop sign, even though design is just as important in that tenth-of-a-cent paperclip as it is in a million-dollar supercar. It's just as important in the small things as the big things, and in the cheap things as in the expensive things. Fundamentally, design is not a luxury. This is one of Squarespace's 6 values. These are used to guide what they do and for each of them, one of the creators they support made a video about it. I'm one of those creators. I make videos explaining how the world works whether it be why cities are where they are or how overnight shipping works. I cover a wide variety of topics, but the one thing that comes up in every single video I make is some aspect of design. Everything involves design. That's why I decided to tackle this value— design's not a luxury. The word design has a connotation that makes that fancy furniture or expensive supercar or elegant building pop into your head. But design is not a feature, it's not a characteristic, it's an essential element in any successful creation process.

Let's talk about those paper clips. They're made from this— galvanized steel wire. The wire has to be exactly 0.8 millimeters thick. Any more than that, the clip will be too rigid to slide papers in. Any less than that and it'll be too flexible and won't exert enough force to hold papers together, but at exactly 0.8 millimeters of thickness, This thin piece of metal, which costs about a tenth of a cent to produce, is able to easily and temporarily keep pages of paper together. The incandescent bulb produces light by pumping huge amounts of electricity through wire filaments— no more than thin pieces of metal. For this, one needs an element that can withstand those huge amounts of electricity like tungsten which won't melt until it reaches a temperature of 6,192 degrees Fahrenheit. At high temperatures, though, the material will burn or catch fire, but if you don't have oxygen, you can't have fire. That's what the glass is for— to keep oxygen out and a non-flammable inert gas in so that the tungsten filament doesn't catch fire. The A-sided red stop sign is used in Colombia and Cambodia and countless other countries around the world. It is the world's universal signifier to stop and it's red for a reason. From poison dart frogs to redback spiders, many of the world's most poisonous and venomous animals are red. Psychologists have found that primates, including humans, are hardwired to avoid red. It's a biologically encoded signal to stop. Humans are built to notice and respond to the color red, so stop signs are built to be noticed and responded to by humans by being red. It's the perfect color to suit this job.

Design is about finding that perfect color. It's about searching for the equilibrium. Finding the perfect thickness for paperclips, or the perfect element for filaments, or the perfect color for stop signs. Design is not just a science or an art, it's the science of art. It's the magic of tweaking objects, images, and processes to improve the interaction between them and us. It's about taking hundreds of data points or elements or parts and bringing them together into one clean and complete package. It's for making the world look better, build better, and work better. Design is not a goal, it's a necessity. It's the basis for creation. Design is not a finish line, it's the starting line. It's how we build things for us. Design is not an ambition, a mission, or an intention. It's not a conclusion, a resolution, or accumulation. It's not just an added perk. Design is not a luxury. It's what makes the world work.