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	title of this thread your message But at the same time, I think that once one makes the value shift to desiring more efficiency and/or environmental friendlyness in one's products, then one quickly comes back to the issue of how do we not only engineer these products to be efficient and environmentally friendly, but also how do we make them beautifully. Beauty is beauty. Beauty, or aesthetic appeal, is one of many facets of a thing. Aesthetics are the rules of making things beautiful and appealing. Beauty is not function. Function is function. Beauty is not efficiency. Efficiency is efficiency. We learn this all the time in the innovative things we make. At first, all we care about is getting the function right and just try to make it as inoffensive looking as we can. But then at a certain point, we begin to try to differentiate our product with beauty, or improved aesthetics if you will. It is like it takes some time for producers and consumers to get sufficiently used to the new function, to begin letting our aesthetic urges kick in. An example of this in my life time would be regional shopping malls. For the first 25 years of their existence, a mall could be ugly and flourish simply because it was new and a monopoly in its market and massively improved shopping efficiency of the consumer (one stop etc.). But then everything shifted to malls and butt ugly box stores encroached. And so to keep their customers, malls had to begin to think about visual and contact point aesthetics. They had to be made more plush and less ugly. PCs are another example. Plain manila boxes for 20 years; then suddenly, translucent with all kinds of forms. Cars are another. The Model T came in any color as long as it was black; then many car lines with every color in the rain bow and style, style, style. We can be certain of three things in life: death, taxes, and the early stage of any major new product emphasizing function and paying little attention to aesthetics. There are of course exceptions. Certain large corporations and certain exceedingly wealthy persons find ways to avoid taxes almost entirely. And certain new products, like an iPod, with the rare CEO who has a sense of aesthetics informing him, insists on a splendidly designed product, as well as one with sound engineering. But for the most part, ground breaking new products often take several iterations before they become informed by a truly appealing form language. associated web images (optional) associated web link (optional) your email your password create a forums account \| you forgot your password?