When we think of modernism, we think of Bauhaus. By now, its rational, minimal style seems like an almost intrinsic part of design, with major elements acting as the basic visual template for Western design more than 100 years after its founding.

But the European Bauhaus—the original version of its younger American counterpart—was about more than aesthetics. A focus on social issues and ‘intangible spacial qualities’ differentiated it from the school that traveled to the US. That second iteration, whose founders fled to various cities in the US due to political strife in Nazi Germany, was ultimately more interested in ”adopting the Modernist aesthetic because it was a highly popular and profitable one. The holistic tenets were lost in what was the wholly different economic climate of a mid-twentieth century capitalist environment.” (Schranz, 2024; 62)

The European Bauhaus placed a “great emphasis placed on intuition. If the Bauhaus became synonymous with a rigid, white-rendered international style, its early years were far more expressionist.” Is it time that we reacquaint ourselves with what may be a less data-precise but more humanistic way of designing?

What if rationality isn’t the designer’s most valuable skill and simplification their greatest asset? What if those are intuition and wise decision-making? I’d argue that we know this deep down, but to survive in the current design paradigm, we misattribute many of our actions to rational thinking.

Let’s see how.

Unknown knowns

It’s hard to blame designers individually for embracing rationalism; more or less, over the last century, the industry has fully committed to it as a visual style and strategic process. The continued deification of modernist design heroes, extensive coverage in design school curricula, and the business world’s wholesale adoption of the style don’t give us many alternatives if we want to be successful in this industry. Peer pressure is a helluva drug.

While rationalist design has sustainable potential because of its modest, clean aesthetic, its real effect is increased commodification and less sustainability. “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” [Dieter] Rams said in 1976. “The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.”

If only Dieter were right. Rather than avoiding thoughtlessness, rationalist design stimulates economic growth and consumption through cost reduction on the manufacturing end and increased desirability on the consumer end—similar to how, in the 1800s, corporations increased margins by using mechanization to imitate the ‘artist’s touch’ while employing far fewer artists than before.

We’re also told that rationalism ‘makes sense’ and that we can make correct, bulletproof decisions by basing design decisions on so-called universal principles. There’s an aspect of moral authority; you can’t argue with geometry, so rationalism must be universally ‘good design.’ But in a world with a plurality of universes and myriad methods to apply geometry, how can just one way of thinking take the title of good design?

It’s important to note that this ‘emotion-free’ way of thinking is built on the false premise that we can make completely emotionless decisions; even the fact that you value rationalism over intuition or ornamentation is, in some way, an emotional perspective. What are values, if not a reflection of deep-seated emotions?

While revolutionary in its day, the ongoing attempt to disassociate from our emotions leads to a disassociation from nature and the qualities that make us human. This ‘othering’ allows us to exploit and appropriate one another, wildlife, and the planet’s natural abundance. But nature lives in the physical world, not on a balance sheet, so as we’re seeing now—with the climate starting to act more erratically—actions have consequences, even if they happen decades or centuries in the future.

Text that says, "in a world with a plurality of universes, how can just one way of thinking take the title of ‘good design?’"

Play logic

Despite attempts to present themselves logically, to a large extent, designers do deeply intuitive work. Anyone who has built a brand, product, or business could tell you this. Our work risks mundanity when built on purely rational, mathematical principles. It needs humanity and intuitive nudging to make it feel just right. From naming, typographic forms, and audio composition to color palettes, brand systems, and illustration, there’s often a smudging of the rules—a lens de-correction—that needs to be applied to make our work look, sound, or feel right even though it’s technically wrong.

Often lacking a business degree, do designers feel we must emphasize our rational side to gain credibility—to get a “seat at the table,” as we tend to call it? Especially with bigger brands, we’re nearly obliged to justify every decision, not only because there could be millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue on the line but also to satisfy decision-makers who might not see the work until later stages. Rather than methods to make sense of the world, in the modern day, rationality, quantification, and provably ‘correct’ solutions seem to be the price we pay to get our work through and avoid starving artistry.

So, rationality makes getting approvals easier, but intuition (and years of experience) makes the work connective. How do we clear space for what’s important? I want to make a high-level connection to what Holly Haworth says in Solastalgia concerning humanity’s contact with nature:

A story can be told about how the disappearance of the world around us corresponded with the replacement of the feeling human body with machines. The Industrial Revolution mechanized handiwork. Mechanical innovations seemed to hold out the promise of mass-producing happiness. Workers’ hands were cut off often in factories, as they rushed to operate machinery. Modern people used their hands less and less as simple household tasks became automated, and goods they would have made by hand could be bought at stores. As each decade passed, the hands touched more human-made things, less of the earth from which the “raw” materials for those things came. …

We have touched every place on the planet now, but as our species’ reach has expanded, ironically, we touch the world less and less with our hands, and we’ve lost the feeling that we are being touched back. To touch is active, but to be touched is passive; it requires us to acknowledge the agency and power of what touches us.

In conjunction with rationalism’s emotional erasure, this ‘dematerialization’—epitomized by the featureless rectangles we carry daily—further divorces us from our physical senses and the ability to know what nature feels like. In the current moment, when we’re on track for 3.1ºC warming by 2100, what makes less sense than creating design work that adds another layer of abstraction and increases the separation between us and the world?

We clear space by realizing that the economy—and design—depends on the livability of the planet, not the other way around.

Many worlds

There may be one physical world, but there are many ways to live in it. Rationalist designers' “universal” conception of design was—and is—a paternalistic, Eurocentric way of saying their way was the only way.

We miss a lot of subtext when we only think, act, and design rationally; maybe that’s why, over fifty years after Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, the design industry still responds to climate change with little more than (more) sustainable materials. The industry at large sees it as irrational to consider wider system change. Perhaps the only thing more irrational is the thought that the system should stay the same.

Rationalism has forced our ideas of intelligence, imagination, and the future into a narrow perspective that is not inclusive and, by necessity, removes alternative ways of thinking. It forces us to live in a “One-World World,” say some design theorists like Arturo Escobar and sociologist John Law. Plant communication seems irrational if you only think about communicating as humans do, and introducing wolves into a habitat to save deer seems irrational until you learn about ecosystem management. Likewise, using design for something more than business seems silly until you realize our industry is at the center of a planet-destroying machine called capitalism.

The 21st century—and the unfolding climate crisis it will surely be known for—are asking us to think more intuitively as people and designers. To think beyond the rational, mechanical, and reductive methods of the 20th century.

An intuitive, social focus will help us think in systems—which we desperately need to do because, as it turns out, design affects the entire world around it. Not in a ‘we’ll save the world way,’ but in an ‘actions have consequences’ way. We can no longer nihilistically isolate ourselves in the corner, but by the same token, we can’t believe we hold all the answers; the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Text that says, "the only thing more irrational than changing the entire system is the thought that it should stay the same."

Shades of grey

The problem with intuition is that it’s not exact. Leading only with intuition can cause us to miss things, just like leading only with rationalism might. Biases are inherent.

But rationality, for all its quantification, doesn’t eliminate biases either—summed up nicely by influential Austrian modernist Adolf Loos’ belief that ‘ornament is a crime’ and linked with earlier, now obsolete forms of human evolution. For him, a lack of ornament was a sign of a more advanced civilization. (Yes, if you’re wondering, he was super racist.)

As we’ve seen from the last 40+ years of neoliberalism and privatization, data-driven decisions don’t seem to work so well for all but a sliver of society. Rationalism—at least in how it’s currently deployed through technology, capitalism, and control—tends to turn social value and commonly held goods into private, commodifiable business value.

If rationality is, at least in part, causing the poly crisis, maybe our response should be, at least in part, "more-than-rational”—intuition, emotions, poetry, art, and more. Maybe developing an emotional connection with nature inspires you to change how you design a business, a brand system, or how the furniture you create will move through various ecosystems. Maybe it drives you to integrate non-human personas into your design process.

The authors of Relationality recommend ‘going awkward’ instead of going forward, which

might mean flourishing in the cracks and fissures of oppressive designs and practices; attuning to the intuitive, the irrational, the feminine, the sacred, the ineffable; building rhizomes in all kinds of possible directions with like-minded experiments, concepts, and struggles; committing to place despite the pressure to delocalize and de-communalize; creating pluriversal kinds of collective intelligence on the heels of digitality; meditating on and organizing horizontally for the phasing out of a civilization premised on infinite growth, unbridled competition, and extractive capitalism.

No one way of seeing the world is complete; we must develop the right methods for the circumstances. But the 21st century might have to be one in which we make design productive instead of reductive, lead with intuition rather than the rational methodology that seems to have led us astray, and regain the Bauhaus’s social focus that’s long been abandoned in lieu of KPIs and MVPs.