Style over substance, Snapchat, and the end of the world

Here at meettheboss.tv, we’re not bubble experts. But sometimes there’s a bubble so large, so perfectly pink and pregnant, so desperate to burst, that even we can’t ignore it. Adam Burns takes his pin to design for design’s sake.

Design happened because rich people needed a way of expressing wealth beyond size, and its booms have turned to bust before. When the Romans prioritised beautiful towns and cities over brutal fortification: decline and fall. When some British prioritised garden follies, buildings that serve absolutely no purpose, over running an empire: others started America.

It’s happening again. And this time the fateful last breath, the wafer-thin mint of air that makes our bubble pop, is called Snapchat.

The four horsemen of this forthcoming technocalypse have been galloping the world’s silicon valleys and superhighways for a while. We’ve just been too busy to notice, what with tweeting live from our spectacles and talking to our wristwatch. So here they are, in all their terrible glory…

1. Conquest. Tesla and Fisker set out to make great, battery-powered cars. Tesla focused on the battery: the source of their car’s power. Fisker focused on design. Because, I mean, what the hell, right? So long as you sit by the side of the road waiting for assistance in a good-looking car, right? #YOLO. Guess which one recently filed for bankruptcy?

2. War. Once, Nokia made mobile telephones that everybody used and Apple made mobile telephones for people who wear polo necks. In California. In Summer. When that changed, instead of a business plan, Nokia took credit for inventing colour. This is what happens when designers rule.

3. Famine. Bad communication is fast food: empty calories and cheap filler that look like a tasty burger. Your designers, starving and devoid of direction, have started eating each other, like cannibal zombies rocking Garrett Leight and camouflage trainers. Go check. Take a gun.

4. Death. Snapchat. If the Romans had Snapchat, Nero would have been pulling faces into his smartphone while Rome burned. Its USP can be overridden by taking a screengrab. Its own description reads: ‘the allure of fleeting messages reminds us about the beauty of friendship’. Which means so little it should be advertising perfume. But Snapchat makes a blurred photo look astonishingly well designed, so it’s worth a conservative $3 billion. Of course it is.

We have a decision to make. Save the world from style over substance, or continue on this road and face ‘the great correction’. Your new leaders will carry pocket tools, wear socks with sandals, and drive a Subaru. Your next fixed-gear bicycle will have foam bumpers, and your iPhone 6s (‘s for safety’) will come with a two-word, five-star review from Practical Parenting that reads ‘Finally: sturdy!’

There is a ray of light. Speaking recently to Leading Company, Selena Griffith, senior lecturer and coordinator of the Design Management, Practice and Innovation courses at Australia’s University of New South Wales, addressed the issue of design for design’s sake. “We found that designers were creating too complex products to be manufactured,” she said. “When we got designers talking to the workers and manufacturers in order to understand what made the products difficult to make, we solved this.”

We need to talk. Flashy designers, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the earth…