"Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people"
About this Quote
Watson’s line reads like a quiet rebuke to the corporate instinct to treat design as polish: the last-minute sheen that makes a product look expensive, modern, inevitable. He grants business its usual twin demands - practical and aesthetic - then deliberately demotes them. “But above all” is the pivot: design isn’t a captive of the balance sheet or the style guide; it’s accountable to the person on the other end of the object, interface, or system.
The subtext is managerial as much as moral. Watson, speaking from an era when large organizations were professionalizing at scale, is effectively telling executives that “good taste” and “efficiency” are not endpoints; they’re instruments. In midcentury corporate America, design was becoming a competitive lever (think streamlined industrial forms, branded consistency, the promise of modernity). Watson harnesses that trend while warning against its most seductive failure mode: confusing the appearance of progress with progress itself.
What makes the quote work is its triangulation. Practicality without people becomes bureaucracy; aesthetics without people becomes spectacle; business without people becomes extraction. By putting “serve people” in the foreground, Watson smuggles a proto-user-centered ethic into a boardroom vocabulary. It’s not anti-profit; it’s anti-self-congratulation. Even the ellipsis feels telling - a pause that mimics a leader catching himself before he says the quiet part out loud: design is power, and power needs a constituency.
Read now, it lands as an early argument against “design thinking” as theater. The real test isn’t whether the product looks right or sells well. It’s whether it respects the lives it lands in.
The subtext is managerial as much as moral. Watson, speaking from an era when large organizations were professionalizing at scale, is effectively telling executives that “good taste” and “efficiency” are not endpoints; they’re instruments. In midcentury corporate America, design was becoming a competitive lever (think streamlined industrial forms, branded consistency, the promise of modernity). Watson harnesses that trend while warning against its most seductive failure mode: confusing the appearance of progress with progress itself.
What makes the quote work is its triangulation. Practicality without people becomes bureaucracy; aesthetics without people becomes spectacle; business without people becomes extraction. By putting “serve people” in the foreground, Watson smuggles a proto-user-centered ethic into a boardroom vocabulary. It’s not anti-profit; it’s anti-self-congratulation. Even the ellipsis feels telling - a pause that mimics a leader catching himself before he says the quiet part out loud: design is power, and power needs a constituency.
Read now, it lands as an early argument against “design thinking” as theater. The real test isn’t whether the product looks right or sells well. It’s whether it respects the lives it lands in.
Quote Details
| Topic | Customer Service |
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