DESIGN MONEY

Money.

Money is the talisman of our self-regard.  We carefully monitor the quantity as a way to shape our actions.  It is a fundamental societal currency.  It is a proxy for gauging societal achievement.

What is the currency of design?  Is there a type of design money?  Is there a fundamental design currency?

Emotion.

The better the design, the more emotion it brings.  Emotions can be positive or negative.  But it is the quantity of the emotional unit that is important.  The better the drawing.  The better the painting.  The better the building, the more emotions it elicits from us.

A cookie cutter suburban house that looks like every other cookie cutter suburban house does not stimulate emotions in us.  It is a bad design.

Hagia Sophia, on the other hand, elicits a very large emotional quantity within us.  We are moved by the forms and the shadows.  We are stunned by the beauty.

It is too bad that we do not have a commonly accepted method to count or quantify our emotional response.  Think how different our design world would be if we could count our emotional responses, in the same way that we count our money.

If we had a commonly accepted design currency, a lot more people would pay a lot more attention to design.  If you knew the amount that was in the emotional account of your house, you had better believe that you would not accept a house with a low emotional quantity.

As a practicing professional, I am always having to deal with my client’s worry of the money value of their house.  They are always worried that they will not be able to get the money out that they put in when they sell.

But if there was an emotional quantity.  If a potential buyer would realize that they could buy, with money, a house with a high emotional quantity, the buyer would pay more for the house.

Which is what I always tell my clients.  If the design is really good, people will pay more money for it.  When people walk in and say wow, they are expressing their high emotion quantity.

I just wish there was a quantifiable unit of emotion.  If that were true, designers would make more money than the paper shufflers in hedge funds.

In these pages, we have looked at the quantization of design.  We looked at DESIGN RISK COEFFICIENT.  We also looked at something we called an OPTIMISM QUOTIENT.  Now let’s add DESIGN MONEY.  If we could establish units of quantity of design, then design would increase in stature.  It seems that we love to count things.  And if we can’t count it, then it somehow has lower cultural value.