In Ge Wang's Artful Design, he presents Principle 1.15:

\"Design not only from needs--but from the values behind them.\"

The ideas I have always been presented when it comes to engineering, design, and other such endeavors, is that in order for a piece of work to be \"valid,\" it must address some kind of need. Little thought has been given to the idea that needs stem from values, and that the needs that those values generate can be questioned and interrogated. In my opinion, this way of thinking should inform whether a specific need is the place to focus our design skills, rather than the value that that needs stems from. For instance, I recently learned that the school district I grew up in was implementing a program of random drug testing for (essentially) all students. The details are too messy to get into now, but in essence, a huge part of the discussion was how to design the testing process as fair as possible, and to design the punishments for failing the test such that they discourage drug use. Rarely was the implicit, but elephant-in-the-room-like, value of \"we, as the school district, should endeavor to find out what drugs our students are taking, and then punishing them for it.\"

Essentially, the school district decided that it valued being part of the carceral system to help purportedly reduce the harms of drug use. From that value sprung the need to design a system that was (or at least looked) fair. However, if we question whether that value is what, as a designer, we feel we should design for, a whole other world of possibilities opens up. In this example, the point is less that school district bad, high schoolers drugs good, but more that awareness of the values informing a design can better illuminate its consequences, whether intentional or not.

On a totally different note, I want to talk about the element of tactility in design. Ge writes that \"the sublime is an aesthetic experience.\" I agree, but I think that the tactile element of the sublime is often ignored. For instance, I make a fair amount of clothing, partially because I think many clothes sold today are designed for an age in which we assume that somebody is filming us at all times. We value how we look over any other sensory experience. Thus, the texture, drape, and other tacile elements of clothing are relegated to merely a supporting role. Despite this, I think that a key element of a piece of clothing making someone feel more or less confident is whether it feels right to wear. It's the way a fake collar under a sweater doesn't feel like wearing a dress shirt, even though in a photo they may look the same. In addition, because the main ways we interact with consumer technology today are visual, the tactile has been relegated to the back burner in consumer technology. This is partially because we have good ways of generating visual stimuli on demand, while tactile stimuli are not nearly as well-developed. In my opinion, this is what holds back a lot of digital music instruments. Physical instruments provide tactile feedback, and for many musicians, the tactile aspect of their instruments are the cues they become most attuned to, even more than aural cues. Without that tactile feeling, it is very difficult to achieve the sublime. The feeling of a chilly NorCal beach breeze, to me at least, is perhaps even more essential to the experience of that beach than what I can see. Tactility perhaps could be summarized as the element of \"here-ness\" that so often accompany or inform the sublime.