The common toilet bowl does not bare well the posture of the urinating adult male. Regardless of precision, the down stream inevitably exceeds its destination: tainted water splashes and the final drips of expulsion find their way to the rim, the floor, the seat. The result is a rank bathroom which serves not just as a perpetual unpleasantry, but as a site of contention in a multi-gendered household.

This is not a criticism of the functioning of the bowl; I'm saying nothing about its construction: it works perfectly. Neither am I suggesting that the toilet bowl is a bad or weak idea; no, the idea of the bowl is fine. What's wrong is that the toilet bowl is not well designed. It does not carry itself harmoniously in the world; it misconstrues the event in which it is a key participant.

Design is situated at a complex juncture. It is neither idea nor thing but the shaping of an experience, its job to insinuate itself within a life in progress and prod that life in a particular way. Now, an idea must do the same thing, but an idea is virtual, anticipating things and actions, but not yet tending to them. The idea of a toilet bowl exceeds the variety of particular bowls; indeed, to the idea, a Turkish toilet, a urinal, and Port-a-Potty are all the same. A thing, too, must anticipate life's existant circumstances; after all, the toilet bowl is porcelain, easy to clean, stain resistant up to a point. But the design has a much more intimate and insidious role: it lends shape to experience, veering us this way instead of that. Design, like a law, compels bodies.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York boldly steers the viewer into a particular relationship with the environment in general and art in particular. Frank Lloyd Wright created a casual experience of viewing art: it is as natural as following the singular, winding ramp up and down. The viewing of art becomes continuous with the movement of the walking body. As a result, the viewer is compelled in a particular direction; there's no offshoots, no estuaries from which to escape the inevitable incline of the ramp. And indeed after its construction the building was greeted with vocal dissent from artists. It is inappropriate, they claimed, to view art within such a space, the viewer always a bit askew vis-à-vis the work. But at the heart of this debate lies the design, which is to say, the very real relationship between art and life.

The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault was keenly aware of the insidious and hegemonic power of design. He noticed that schools, hospitals, and jails share a common design: compartmentalized rooms which radiate from a more or less centralized locus. Of course, the idea of a school differs dramatically from the idea of a hospital or jail. And no doubt the particularities of the buildings themselves differ dramatically: there are rarely locked, caged doors in either a school or hospital. But Foucault's great observation is that their design is the same. Which is to say, the shaping of experience is common: all three institutions construct a similar relationship between and amongst bodies. In all three places, the subject is (more or less) confined to a square space and is (more or less) worked on, as it were, by an authority (teacher, doctor, warden/guard).

Design is the anticipation of an event, an imminent effect. In a certain sense, it is thoroughly spectral, hovering between the invisible world of ideas and the tangible world of materials. Design moves like the shadow of an idea, within the mechanisms of objects and bodies. With a hand at once sure and slight, design nudges us this way and that, molding the world into shapes and trajectories, birthing new bodies and experiences as it goes.