The case for a life fit for purpose
Updated: Sep 13
A distant relative of mine spent much of his life designing beds.
Sir Ambrose Heal joined his family’s furniture business in the late nineteenth century and became one of the figures associated with bringing modern design into British homes.
His furniture was simpler than much of what came before it. Less ornament. Cleaner lines. Built around usefulness rather than display.
Some of his early designs were apparently regarded by the Heal’s sales staff as resembling prison furniture. Which is one way of discovering that you are ahead of your time.
Years later, the designer Sir Gordon Russell described the rather peculiar position Ambrose occupied. “Like most pioneers,” he wrote, “he was sniped at from all quarters.” Traditional craftsmen distrusted him because he ran an efficient commercial business. To conventional businessmen, he was, in Russell’s rather wonderful phrase, “a long-haired chap with odd notions.”
I like this considerably more than the tidier historical description of him as a pioneer of modern British design. There is something reassuring about discovering that pioneers rarely look like pioneers while they are doing the pioneering. Quite often they just look difficult.
What interests me most about Ambrose, though, is not the furniture itself. It is the question underneath it.
Is this thing fit for purpose?
In 1915, Ambrose became a founding member of the Design and Industries Association. Its rallying cry was “Fitness for Purpose”: design should begin with what something is actually there to do.
A chair is not improved by being impressive if it is uncomfortable to sit in. A table does not become better because it looks magnificent if nobody can comfortably eat around it.
The obvious thing is to begin with what the thing is actually for.
It seems obvious enough when the material is oak. We are much less inclined to ask the same question of our lives.
We inherit structures remarkably easily. A working week. A definition of success. A way of organising a family. A career ladder. A house. A routine. An idea of what someone of our age or education or income is supposed to be doing next. And because the structure exists, we often assume it is doing its job.
But sometimes it isn't.
A career can look extremely successful and be badly designed for the person living it.
A calendar can be impressively full while containing almost nothing its owner particularly values.
A home can be designed beautifully and work badly for the people inside it.
A definition of success can survive long after the person who once wanted it has changed.
This is where the designer’s question becomes useful.
What is this for?
Not: What does it look like from outside?
Or: Is this what people like me normally do?
Not even: Am I good at it?
What purpose is this structure actually meant to serve?
Take work. A job might exist to provide financial security. Or challenge. Or status. Or belonging. Or interesting problems. Or enough freedom to spend afternoons with your children.
Different jobs can be fit for very different purposes. The problem begins when we optimise for one purpose while expecting the job to fulfill another.
We chase status and wonder why we lack freedom. We choose stability and resent the lack of novelty.
We ask work to provide identity, community, meaning, money and self-worth, and are then surprised by the strain placed on a single employment contract.
There is nothing particularly wrong with ambition in any of this. It is simply worth knowing what the object is for before deciding whether it works.
The same applies to the smaller structures.
What is your morning for?
What is the money you are accumulating for?
What is the Saturday that has somehow become entirely devoted to errands for?
These questions can sound almost absurdly functional. But design is functional.
It begins with the life being lived, not with an abstract idea of what good design ought to look like.
There is, however, a fairly large problem with applying design principles to a life. Life is not furniture.
Furniture is wonderfully obedient.
If a table is badly proportioned, you can alter it. If a room is badly laid out, you can move things around.
Human beings have to contend with other human beings, economics, bodies, timing, accidents, ageing, uncertainty and the irritating fact that events do not consistently respect our intentions.
There are limits to what better design can solve. That distinction has become increasingly interesting to me. Some parts of a life really are badly designed. They can be changed.
A boundary can be set. A job can be left. A routine can be rebuilt. A conversation can be had. A skill can be learned. Something that no longer fits can be redesigned.
Other parts are not design problems at all. They are conditions we have to live inside. Someone else's decision. A period of waiting. Ageing. Loss. An uncertain outcome. A past that refuses to become a different past simply because we have thought very hard about it.
That is the distinction I have been exploring through Design / Inhabit.
Design what is genuinely available to be shaped.
Learn to inhabit what is not.
The usefulness, for me, lies partly in avoiding a category error.
We can waste years trying to accept situations that actually need redesigning. And we can exhaust ourselves trying to redesign realities that can only be inhabited.
Perhaps the first question, then, is not whether a life is successful. It is whether its structures are fit for their purpose.
And after that comes another question.
Is this something I can change?
More than a century ago, Ambrose Heal was interested in making the things people lived with more thoughtful, useful and suited to ordinary life. I seem to have ended up interested in a related problem.
My material is just slightly less cooperative than oak.
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