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necessarily bad and can function quite well in the design process until someone decides to call it,” Bierut said as the argument unfolded. I began to suspect that my own distaste for bullshit, grounded in the dictionary definition, was more severe than that of many designers, especially those who had come to regard a degree of bullshit as an inescapable part of dealing with clients. Bierut pointed out that “charlatans have long been viewed with something verging on affection in American culture,” and someone else mentioned the snake-oil salesman as a quintessential American character. Whichever way you look at it, though, a too-ready acceptance of the idea of bullshit spells problems for design. From the way the word was bandied about, it seemed that any explanation dealing with the intangible esthetic aspects of designing ran the risk of being written off as bullshit. Using the word as a lazy synonym for rationalization does intellectual damage to design, suggesting that “fancy talk” offered in support of a design decision will always be suspect, no matter how apt or well-intentioned. In fact, the meaning of bullshit is much more specific. The bullshitter speaks purely for effect. He cares only about the way his words influence the listener. For this reason, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than an outright lie. The liar knows and accepts the truth but chooses to deny it. The bullshitter couldn’t care less whether what he says is true or not. Referring to the use of so-called bullshit in client meetings, Bierut notes the “desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of the larger goal: getting your client to do it the way you like.” But is this really bullshit? What, after all, is being concealed? It must be obvious to the client that the designer is trying to win acceptance for the design proposal. That’s a given. It must further be obvious that anything the designer says, any rationale offered, has this aim in view. The designer would be guilty of misleading the client—of bullshitting—only if he knew that his preference would not serve the project’s purpose and might even harm it, but he chose to hide this and make a case for it anyway. It’s quite possible that this happens all the time, though not a single designer owned up to such irresponsible behavior in the Design Observer discussion. However, if a designer sincerely believes that his preferences will serve a project’s aims, then “bullshit” is the wrong word to describe any rationale used to support them. Moreover, it is inevitable, given the subjective component of so much design, that designers will sometimes realize only later why their intuitions were appropriate.“If you made something red because ‘it felt right’ and later realized that it evokes worker solidarity or sexual abandon or fire trucks or hot sauce,” writes Gunnar Swanson,“it is neither lying nor abandoning truth to say ‘the color red does x.’” Exactly. What tended to be overlooked in this discussion was the far more serious problem of the pervasiveness of bullshit in our culture. If designers can accept bullshit as part of their working experience, as a selling technique they might legitimately use on clients, then how scrupulous are they about having a hand in communications that contribute to the avalanche of bullshit in advertising, commercial promotion, and the media? Frankfurt certainly believes that there is a connection between the two phenomena.