Ornament and culture

Interface as social signifier.

In 1913, at the height of the Art Nouveau movement, Adolf Loos, an architect and theorist, was appalled and aghast. Everywhere he looked, ornamentation was spoiling his beloved Vienna.

Loos was a believer in the future. Inspired by his visit to the Chicago World’s Fair, he became a devotee of the Sullivan mandate of “form follows function”. In Loos’ eyes, the old world, with its dedication to complicated folk art adorning every surface, was dying. The industrial revolution, and the arrival of automated systems and management of humans, promised a new frontier. Gone was the old folkways of handcraft and guilds. Loos, like many intellectuals of his day, saw this as a pivotal evolutionary fulcrum for humans, and he was excited.

The world at the time was reeling, as the industrial revolution had thrown labor, economics, politics, and yes, even art and design, into a delirium. The value of what it meant to be a human was up for debate. What was the value of a human when these machines could do all the work? What was a craftsperson’s role when industrial factories could make well-designed chairs, shoes, posters at a scale heretofore unheard of?

Loos took it upon himself to publish a version of a talk he had been giving in salons for years, and he entitled the manifesto, “Ornament and Crime”. It remains one of the most famous nearly-political polemics on architecture and design in the last 100 years, and some credit it with being the foundational text for the Bauhaus movement.

In it, he takes square aim at the idea of ornamentation of any type. To bolster this, Loos presents two main arguments:

1. Ornamentation takes too long for workers to make at scale, and gives no real value.
2. Ornamentation is strictly the domain of “degenerates”, and much like natural selection smooths a species to only its most essential shape, so too must design prioritize essential function alone.

Loos takes very little time in the essay to turn his association with artful decoration into racist tropes. (“Are we alone, the people of the nineteenth century, supposed to be unable to do what any Negro, all the races and periods before us have been able to do?”) But putting aside the casual association Loos makes between evolution and eugenics, Loos really reveals himself in this passage:

“Ornament does not heighten my joy in life or the joy in life of any cultivated person. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I choose one that is quite smooth and not a piece representing a heart or a baby or a rider, which is covered all over with ornaments. The man of the fifteenth century won’t understand me. But all modern people will.”

It is 2025, and Loos’ ideas are again ascendant. If I have one overarching mission in these design essays, it’s to communicate that history doesn’t repeat exactly, but it gets pretty darn close. We cannot know the future, but using the past as a guidepost is usually a decent starting point for figuring out which way to go.

As our culture right now is in a period of flux and change, so too is the language of design. Once again, technology has arrived which gives everyone pause. Once again, some welcome this as a utopia ascendant, and some are much less convinced. And just like that period roughly one hundred years ago, we are now struggling again with what it means to be a human in a world of new technology.

For some, like Loos, the winnowing and removal of ornament is the logical end point of a kind of post-humanist ideal. Into this thought space steps a style labeled digital minimalism, but I would call a kind of neo-futurism, as at its base it is not about the removal of distraction, but actually about a removal of the human from the process. The design style is distinctly and intentionally inhuman, and like Loos, it finds unnecessary ornamentation to be appalling and gaudy. The elevation of AI in this design space is paramount, and why not? AI is trained on humans, but it is better, less messy (at least, that’s the promise). And you don’t need to be a statistician to notice who champions this style.

On the other side of the spectrum, an interface style is emerging that is a total rejection of this philosophy. Heavily influenced by the over-design of video games, it leans very strongly into ornamentation and hand-craft, a modern day Arts & Craft movement. In these circles, the simulation of the hand-crafted is the ideal. Textures. Hand drawn effects and animation. An intentional overwhelm of ornamentation. All of which are microflags for humanity, crying out, “I’m still here!”. In these circles, AI is denigrated. It is an untrustworthy cash grab by duplicitous companies who don’t want to pay more.

That these two schools sit in co-ascendance is not a coincidence, I think. (And I should hedge and say that I am not against “minimalism”, per se — there are very human versions of minimalism!) Much like the fraught tension between the futurists and the practitioners of Art Nouveau, so too we see our own versions of these battles, but rather than in intellectual salons around Vienna, the battle is being fought in our pockets.

There is also another deeper element at play, and one I am reluctant to address, as it seems nearly to rupture any shared understanding of what “design” actually is for. But I would be deeply remiss if I didn’t bring it up.

Designers like to imagine they’re the spiritual heirs of modernism — rational, progressive, moral. But that’s just a story we tell ourselves.

For as long as I have been in design, I have been told by my betters that design is not art. And at a surface level, this is correct. Every first-year design student is given Dieter Rams as the ur-designer. They are shown his designs as temples to purpose over appearance. His designs are function over form, with nothing unnecessary cluttering the object. But we mistake taking a position for unassailable truth. Rams’ designs were actually polemics. If you listen to Rams talk, his designs are not meant to be neutral, but meant to be taken as a statement. He believes we as a species are wasteful and foolish. His designs are meant to communicate a point of view. This is not neutral “design thinking”. It is Calvinism by any other name, posing as a calculator.

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, design is having a conversation with the user, and having an opinion in that conversation. Much like hack comedians who retreat to the “It was just a joke!” line when called out, I think it’s time product designers stop hiding behind the neutrality qua “we’re just solving problems” stance that has been a fig leaf for far too long.

I would place any wager that most people spend more time touching and gazing at interfaces on their phones than their loved ones. As such, the items we touch and look at every day are heavy with a point of view of the interface creator. When we build things, we make thousands of micro-decisions, and while our best intentions may cry out for user input, this is not the way humans are built. Our biases, our feelings, our politics will move our hand, as sure as the wind carves a canyon, bit by bit.

Adolf Loos may still be regarded as one of the fathers of Modernism, but for me, his reputation and legacy have a much darker tone. Historians can argue the footnotes if they like, but Loos’ work, and the work of like-minded futurists, fertilized the philosophical soil that 1930s fascism took root in. When a design philosophy labels the distinctly human as “degenerate” or “primitive”, it subtly shifts the Overton window on the value of humans themselves. When we try to discard the hand-crafted, we throw out the hand itself.

We are sadly in a similar moment. The human is being degraded as unnecessary, a thing of the past. Just like one hundred years ago, there are powerful people in this world, with enormous sums of money, who believe this. You must think deeply as a designer, and have a conversation with yourself about what your designs are communicating. Designing in 2025 is making political statements about the future of humanity, whether you wish it were so, or not.

Design choices are political choices. Be aware of what you are saying.

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Ornament and Culture was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.