Form over Function = Art

I take a fair amount of crap over my dislike for motorcycles with “personality” and intolerance for form over function (choppers and other non-functional toys). For starters, I’m not particularly visual: ask me what my favorite color is and the answer will be “Who cares?” There are a few colors I don’t like, a lot of colors that are acceptable, and a few that I prefer under particular conditions. Likewise, I tend to look at mechanical things as tools and tools are either useful or not. If they are really useful, I don’t care what they look like at all. Or, at least, I put the cosemetic aspect so far in the background I only think about it in really rare and slightly drunken moments.

My wife is a visual artist. She is very visually oriented and wouldn’t recognize a function if one were staring her in the face. The function of plastic bags evades her, or (like me and colors) she doesn’t care about even basic functions. I buy large bags of bird seed for our outdoor feeders and if she beats me to being first to open a new bag, the bags look like a rabid squirrel chewed its way into the package. This might not seem like a thing to a more normal person, but I have a system for filling the feeders, mostly because I hate squirrels and spillage attracts squirrels. My system is fairly anal, I admit. I cleanly cut the top off of the bag, spread the bag so that it fills the can, stick the feeders all the way into the bag, and fill the feeders with a pitcher so that all of the excess falls back into the bag. She, on the other hand, disassembles the top foot of the bag, pours seed randomly in the container, around the container, and even some into the feeders. Squirrels love her. These bags were actually designed to be containers and a reasonably organized systems of distribution and art turns them into chaos.

So, for 49 years we’ve lived together with disparate interests and conflicting styles. Art, as I define it, comes from an old Greek (or Chinese or Abo) word meaning “not good.” If something is art, the execution will be amateur, the choice and use of materials will be juvenile, and purpose will be obscure or nonexistent. My wife and her artist friends are convinced that I’m too obsessed with purpose and artisanship (an insult, to the art crowd). I’m convinced that if the workmanship sucks, I don’t care about the rest. When I look at a piece of ironwork art, I look at the welds first. If they are amateur, poorly formed, or ground off to hide the poor workmanship, I don’t take the rest of the work seriously. Same for woodworking. I’m looking for a level of workmanship before I start considering the form. As a mediocre musician, I have always required music to be something more complicated than I can perform if I’m going to spend my money on it. 

The fact that this motorcycle is unrideable except under the most restricted conditions defines it as art and not a functional vehicle, in my mind. I’m a big fan of engineering, like the KTM at the beginning of this essay and not much of a fan of cobbled and useless art, like this cruiser. I’m not bragging here. I realize that this function-over-form requirement limits my ability to appreciate purely form-based art. I don’t see anything but discomfort, impracticality, and unnecessary complication and expense when I see a bike like this cruiser. I don’t have a mechanism that allows me to appreciate it as art alone.

A designer/author named Don Norman sums up my problems with bad design (art) in his book, The Design of Everyday Things, “Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.” Motorcycles, for example, are dangerous, complicated, and non-intuitive (countersteering, for example). Good design would minimize that. Lousy design adds to all of the negatives without providing any value, other than chaos, to the rider. And if you’re not riding your motorcycle, you are not a motorcyclist but an owner of a piece of art.

As Norman said about Apple products in a FastDesign article a while back, “Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them.” Likewise, motorcycles with a primary purpose of “looking pretty” are destroying motorcycling by convincing rube motorcyclists that looking cool (or clownish, depending on your perspective) is more important than going places safely and competently. These toys are so badly designed that they need to make as much noise as possible to compensate for the fact that the riders are helpless to defend themselves with the qualities a decently designed motorcycle and motorcyclist take for granted; agility.

Wow! If I were in a better mood, I’d go back and pare this down to one argument. I’m not in a good mood and probably won’t be for at least 4 years. The worship of ignorance, chaos, and corruption has become a national religion and I don’t expect to enjoy it any more than I like looking at a piece of badly executed “art.”

Pick A Grudge

A while back, I wrote about my bias/grudge/allergy to a couple of motorcycle brands (Call Me "Doubting Thomas"). A while back, in a conversation with a group of college students about customer service, consumer awareness, and who has leverage and when, I was reminded of that bias/grudge/allergy. During that conversation, I realized that I have a few more things to say about this issue. More to the point, I discovered that a lot of people have taken strong biases toward brands and people and it appears that more intelligent people seem to hang on to these positions a lot longer than do . . . let's say "less complicated people."

So, for the fun of it, I decided to list a few of my never-do-that-again biases (in no particular order) and see if readers are interested in joining in:

1. Hyosung -- Not only was the Hyosung GV650-Avitar I reviewed in 2008 a near-perfect pile of crap, but my reward for holding back my real opinion of that poorly assembled bucket of parts was a hysterical temper tantrum from the company's marketing asshole. I probably won't live long enough to forget that experience. I do react poorly to being burned.
2. Sony -- Way back in the 80's, I owned, my employer owned, and several studios I worked for owned Sony CD players and Sony's inability to build a slide-out drawer that didn't jam up or fall off soured me on all-things-Sony for at least 30 years. Five years ago, I bought a Sony camera on recommendation from a friend. It lasted less than a month before the Mini-DV tape door motor began to fail. I thought the memory stick option would be a backup, but that route only recorded low-res video and is useless. This product models everything I expect from Sony. The company is very good at electronics and absolutely miserable with mechanical devices. This is a really old bias/grudge and I was more than a little surprised to realize that I've hung on to this one so long.The camera experience will extend that bias to the end of my life.
3. General Motors -- My father was a dedicated GM customer his whole life. From the 70's on, I don't think he had a single vehicle that wouldn't have been classified as a "lemon," and he traded for (and got screwed on) a new one every couple of years. Normally, my father was a conservative person, but mechanically he was a radical liberal. I drove a series of company trucks, all GM, for a decade and they were no better than my father's collection of junk. I was almost ready to change my opinion based on a California friend's experience with a leased EV1, when GM's corporate brain-tumor decided to trash the whole project. I haven't taken GM seriously since. 
4. McDonalds -- I do not like bullies. I'm not a big fast food fan, but I am not even close to being a food purist. I have not bought or eaten anything from McDonalds since 1997. The company will never see  a dollar of my money again.
5. Presonus -- Disappointing, really. This company ought to be my kind of people. They make cheap, reasonably well-engineered products that pretty much do what they claim to do. Their engineers are a collection of high-tech wizards who are also true believers. However, Presonus is trying to become the next Peavey and that is a whole 'nother world of customer-hostility. I have been disappointed, repeatedly by their products and their customer service is vicious. Been there, done that, won't go back.
6. Harley Davidson -- I suffered an Italian Harley-labeled 250 in the 60's, but that didn't make a mark on me. Years of experience with HD's customers did that job. There is something about a Harley that appears to lower the IQ of anyone who owns one. If you think I need more evidence to make an opinion, you might be permanently damaged. Look around you and see how many wizards you find riding Harleys. I've ridden at least a dozen HD products (not counting Buells) and there is nothing there for me. I may be old, but I'm not that old.  I don't play golf, either.
7. Polaris/Victory Motorcycles -- I hate having this grudge, but it might be one of my most rationally based biases. Several years ago, I bought a Pure Polaris Electric Scooter directly from the company, through one of Polaris' marketing executives. As you can see from the review, I liked this product a lot. As you can tell from the postscript, Polaris' attempt to disavow any knowledge of the Electric Scooter has put them into the grudge category and I've avoided their products since. In fact, when I was asked to do a review of the Polaris Victory Vision, I blew it off until other victims ended up doing the review. There was simply no chance that I would be able to ride one of Victory's hippobikes without being constantly reminded of the beating I'd taken from the company over my little electric scooter. Polaris/Victory is sort of a Minnesota/Wisconsin company and I'd like to like them. But I don't. Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me. 
8. British Engineering -- This might be my oldest and least rational grudge. I owned an MGA in the 60's and there was nothing competent about that vehicle. It, also, drove me bankrupt the first and only time. Since, I have helped friends overhaul MGs, Triumphs (cars and motorcycles), BSAs, Nortons, and Jags and I have not seen any evidence that it is time for me to change my opinion. In the 1970's, the company I worked for bought a half-million-dollar "high tech, heavy duty gas welding" rig that was controlled by British electronics and was almost by itself the reason the company soon laid off 1200 employees. Everything from Vox to Marshall guitar amps and from Trident to SSL consoles has taught me that the Brits are willing to do anything to stuff electronics into a box and sell it for inflated prices. Finally, I rode some of the way to Alaska with a friend on a Tiger and his problems were familiar sutff. As a side note, I was convinced that Top Gear was a comedy show, until a couple of my students set me straight. A British television show that criticizes automotive engineering? WTF? (Sorry, Paul.) I have not ridden a new Triumph, though. Guess why?
9. FRAM Filters -- For years, I heard other people complain about FRAM's oil filters but I kept using them until one fell apart and nearly killed my V-Strom a couple of years ago. 
10. Non-Stick Cookware -- I've had it with this stuff. Talk about a product that breaks your heart. From the cheapest crap to a $90 omelet pan, the non-stick part starts sticking after about 10 uses. It's enough to drive me back to cooking with lard.