# Use is the only honest critic

By Rea Stark, 12 November 2026
Source: https://reastark.com/writing/use-is-the-only-honest-critic

> Awards and photographs judge an object on day one. Good design is proved on the thousandth morning of use, by wear and by repair.

Philippe Starck's lemon squeezer has three thin legs and neither strainer nor bowl. Alessi, the Italian firm, has made it since 1990, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York keeps one in its collection. For the tenth anniversary Alessi plated 10,000 of them in gold. Lemon juice spoils gold plate, so the anniversary squeezer was never meant to meet a lemon.

I hold nothing against it. It is a good small sculpture, and the gold edition admits as much. My quarrel is with the lesson the trade took from it: that the question of what is good design can be settled by looking. It cannot. A thing proves itself the thousandth time a hand reaches for it, and use is the only critic that cannot be charmed.

## Judged on day one

In 2025 the iF Design Award drew almost 11,000 entries from 66 countries. Half went through to a final jury of 102 people, who met in Hamburg for three days. I do not doubt their eye. A jury can pick an object up and switch it on. It cannot own it for ten years.

The same holds for the launch photograph and for the review written in the first week. Each judges an object on its first day, when it is clean and has never been dropped. A first-day verdict favours whatever is new to the eye, and novelty is the one quality sure to be gone by the second year.

I worked on the Citiz and Pixie machines and the Aeroccino milk frother for Nespresso, and my work has won several design awards. I am not handing them back. Prizes go to machines that are new, though, and limescale keeps its own calendar.

Screens have made the bias worse. In 2014 IKEA said that about three-quarters of its product images were computer-generated, which means an object can now sit for its portrait before it exists. Most products are first met as a picture the size of a thumb and bought on that evidence. I trained in photography, so I know what a lens forgives. Design culture has become a branch of photography, and it rewards the object that photographs well over the object that lives well.

## The thousandth morning

Anyone who wants to know what is good design should ask a coffee machine. It is judged every morning for ten years, some 3,650 sittings, by a person who is half asleep and has no interest in design. That person reaches for the machine without looking at it. This critic has never seen the press kit.

Good product design is whatever survives that reach. The lever sits where the hand already is. The drip tray comes out without spilling what it caught. Neither shows in a photograph, and both are decided at the drawing board, long before any jury meets.

The honest critics have plain names: wear, habit, cleaning, repair. Wear shows where hands really went, which is rarely where the designer drew them. Habit is the severest of the four: once a movement is learned the object disappears from attention, and that disappearance is the highest mark it can earn. Cleaning finds every seam that was put there for the camera. Repair asks whether anyone thought about the day after the warranty ends.

Then comes the manual nobody reads. In Japan, on behalf of Electrosuisse and the VDE, I worked to have the user manual counted as part of a product's safety and of its certification. European machinery law ranks the remedies: a danger must first be designed out or guarded against, and only what remains may be handed to the user as a warning. Read that way, a manual is a book of confessions, each caution marking a spot where the object could not speak for itself. A thick manual is a bad review written by the maker.

## Beauty earns its keep

The case against all this is that beauty matters for its own sake, and that a world of obedient appliances would be a dull one. Beauty does matter. The mistake is to hand it to the eye alone. The word aesthetic comes from the Greek for perception by the senses, and the hand is one of them: the weight of a lid and the sound of a lever closing are aesthetic facts as much as any silhouette.

Dieter Rams, whose ten principles of good design are quoted more often than they are obeyed, put the matter flatly: "A product is bought to be used." He also held that the aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness, because the things a person uses every day affect their well-being. Beauty of that kind is confirmed by use, and it earns its keep: a thing that is a pleasure to hold gets mended and kept.

Beauty that cannot bear to be touched belongs on a plinth, and there is no shame in a plinth. Starck's squeezer has its museum. A coffee machine gets no such mercy. It gets Monday.

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Rea Stark is an industrial designer and founder in Zürich. He has designed for Sony and Nespresso, co-founded Piëch Automotive and Archaí Physics, and works on how machines see, understand and use the physical world.

About the author: https://reastark.com/about
More essays: https://reastark.com/writing