As someone who likes to be as accurate as possible when writing (though I admit that I don’t always succeed), I’ve been thinking a lot about the Bravo series entitled “Top Design.” If you aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a competition-based reality program in which interior decorators work with a series of spaces; the last contestant standing wins $100,000, a spread in Elle Decor magazine (which I’d never heard of before watching the show), and “the right to say that they have ‘the’ Top Design,” which doesn’t strike me as much of a reward at all.
Here’s the trouble (and I fully expect to be blasted here)–I don’t really know that interior decorating, especially in terms of what these contestants are doing on TV, is actually design. Yes, there are some elements to their work that are design-oriented tasks, such as space planning and furniture arrangement. Remember, I’m the guy who defines the act of design as the creation of something for a specific practical purpose. And pasting up wallpaper, setting a dining table and gluing plates to the wall alongside pieces of glitter-coated driftwood is not the creation of something for a specific practical purpose… it’s decorating. It’s styling. It’s applying a veneer of attractiveness (or not) to a setup that is largely functional as-is. In some cases, I’d even say that decoration can go too far and actually hinder the usefulness of a functional design.
When you get right down to it, a plain white couch in a plain white room is just as functional as a leather couch in a room with orange zebra-striped walls. That veneer of decoration didn’t do much for the functionality of the room, but it does enhance its sex appeal (assuming that the decorator knows what he or she is doing and that his or her taste matches your own). Thus, I suggest we have the name of the show changed to “Top Decorator.”
