We usually keep beauty and usefulness in separate rooms — beauty for the gallery, usefulness for the workshop. A century ago, the Bauhaus art and design school bet they belonged together: design honestly around function, it promised, and beauty would follow.

This UW Design Community session asks whether that bet paid off.

Using the idea of “functional beauty” and a few famous Bauhaus objects, this talk pulls apart two things we usually run together: a thing working well, and a thing looking like it works well. The gap between them turns out to be small and everywhere — in a 1920s table lamp and on the screen in your pocket. A philosopher’s take, made for the designers, developers and writers who build the things the rest of us use.

This month’s Design Community speaker, Phil Mack, holds a PhD in philosophy and has over 10 years of experience teaching at UW–Madison, Marquette University and UW–Milwaukee. He makes big ideas accessible without jargon or oversimplification and is building a public philosophy practice in the Madison area.

Event details

• When: Monday, June 29, noon to 1pm
• Where: Virtual via Zoom

Connect with the UW Design Community

The UW Design Community is brought to you by the Center for User Experience and IT Connects. Together, we can realize meaningful results for our shared goals of increased engagement and efficiency, student satisfaction, employee productivity, and making our digital campus easier to use.

Join the UW Design Community by emailing uw-design-community+subscribe@g-groups.wisc.edu and join our Teams group.