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The other day, a friend of mine who has a decent desktop PC which I support, told me that he wanted to buy a laptop to add to it and outlined his various ‘needs’ with regard to it. As he was in London, he took a wander down Tottenham Court Road to have a look at what was available.

I had pointed him to look out for Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads, well made and highly functional. A little later he came back and said that what he wanted was something discreet but stylish in looks not some lump of ‘nasty plastic’, he does have a design background but it made me think about the whole concept of ‘beauty’ and question what it is…

The Basis

The following is part of the reply I sent my friend and I repeat it here to establish the starting point of my thoughts:

“On this I cannot really help you too much because “looks and appeal” are rather subjective when it comes to products such as these. I have never been able to judge “male attractiveness or beauty” and have often been totally bemused by what women find attractive in some men. To me, a bloke is either an okay guy or not in the social context you meet them, work, friend, team mate in sport and so on.

Computers of all kinds are the same to me, I have yet to see a “pretty one” and only admire them for what they do and are capable of and to be honest, I suspect that is the view of most “techies” and to make the point, check out this site: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/alist where you can read a number of reviews on different types of laptop from their A Lists.

If you read the reviews and examine them dispassionately, you will quickly realise that if they talk about ‘looks’, it is totally subjective to the technical contents of the package and really has nothing to do with aesthetics.”

Engineering Design and Aesthetics

I will stick with laptops for the moment to try and zero in on what I’m on about. Perhaps the ‘prettiest’ laptop around is the MacBook Air : (http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_air?mco=MTM3NDkzNzU)

However, I wouldn’t buy one or indeed any laptop like it because ‘pretty’ at the cost of basic functionality is a silly trade off to me. Laptops are in comparison to a Desktop PC, a design compromise in terms of what components can be put into them a case in point being the actual CPU or processor which generates a lot of heat. No problem on a desktop with lots of space and airflow to put in a bigger heat-sink and fan but on a laptop, a less powerful CPU may be the only solution open to the designer.

Having for a period of time been very mobile and travelling frequently to and from the States, my Dell Latitude laptop was my “whole world” both business and personal that I took around with me. It wasn’t a fashion statement, it was a practical working tool. To me you just don’t compromise on the practical aspects of a laptop to make it look thinner which then means that you don’t have enough ‘ports and slots’ to hook other devices into it, the engineering aspects take precedence over the aesthetics indeed, they can surely only grow out of solving the engineering ‘problems’ in the first place producing an elegant solution ?

The Consumer Product Mentality

If we look at motor cars, can we say that any of them truly represent the height of “Aesthetic Design” ? When people say; “That is a beautiful car”, what are they referring to, the actual look of the thing or what it represents in terms of status, cost, prestige, the speed it can go at ? Let us think of the front ‘faces’ of some current cars, Audi, Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes, can anybody really say that they are “beautiful” in the purely aesthetic sense ?

Of course motor cars are ancient creatures in terms of the engineering solutions applied even to this day so the majority of the exterior design can be called little more than styling and rather like a hair stylist, they reflect the current consumer mood rather than anything really fundamental that fuses the engineering needs with the aesthetics in a radical and new way. A friend of mine recently remarked that as men became ever more wimpy, their cars got ever more “butch” to try and compensate, it was the only possible explanation for the rash of American style pick up trucks on our roads in their opinion !

Physical Beauty

I suppose inevitably, this leads us to question the basis of physical beauty, the reality and the fashion that accompanies it. Is Kylie really beautiful or did her pert bosom and bum just fit an image that was in demand at the time she ‘broke through’ ? If one runs through the whole Pantheon of the Hollywood Stars over 80-90 years, are we really looking at beauty or just the fashion of the time ?

Angelina Jolie and Julia Roberts do have a certain sexual appeal but, how much is related to looks and how much by the roles they have played in films which appeal to the public at large ? Are actors and actresses assumed to be ‘endowed’ with whatever appealing characteristics of the roles they play, including beauty ?

I have often mused over portraits from the 18th and 19th Centuries where women are described as a “well known beauty of her day…” and I just think; “You’re kidding, I wouldn’t fancy that !”

Conclusion

But in a sense I suppose, all it goes to illustrate is that context is all in such matters. For me and however pretty, I would never buy a Macbook Air because its very design means it has limited instant connectivity and in that area, flexibility. However, for someone else for whom their friends and/or work colleagues find the Macbook Air a “desirable” item, they might well buy one to remain “in with their crowd” because the practicalities are subservient to that.

No, I don’t know the answer and I suspect that the more I question the divide between engineering for function and aesthetics, the less I will be able to hazard a guess.