What is the relationship of bullshit and design?
Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton, is careful to distinguish bullshit from lies, pointing out that bullshit is "not designed primarily to give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the topic, but that its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the speaker."
The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions.
The functional requirement- the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable.
The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels.
Frankfurt points out, it's beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction."
In Concert of Wills, The difference is that each of Meier's victories was hard-won, with endless acres of negotiating, reasoning, and you-know-what expended in the process of winning over the project's army of stakeholders. On the other hand, Robert Irwin, flaunting intuition and impulse as his first, last and only argument, required no compensating bullshit: he's the artist, and that's the way the artist likes it.
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