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November 2004  
  
 _(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition ofHackers & Painters. It tries
to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)_  
  
A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to
Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen
much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished. "It's so _ugly!"_  
  
People from other rich countries can scarcely imagine the squalor of the man-
made bits of America. In travel books they show you mostly natural
environments: the Grand Canyon, whitewater rafting, horses in a field. If you
see pictures with man-made things in them, it will be either a view of the New
York skyline shot from a discreet distance, or a carefully cropped image of a
seacoast town in Maine.  
  
How can it be, visitors must wonder. How can the richest country in the world
look like this?  
  
Oddly enough, it may not be a coincidence. Americans are good at some things
and bad at others. We're good at making movies and software, and bad at making
cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same
reason we're bad at what we're bad at. We're impatient. In America, if you
want to do something, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset
delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above
yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, _just do it._  
  
  
  
This works well in some fields and badly in others. I suspect it works in
movies and software because they're both messy processes. "Systematic" is the
last word I'd use to describe the way good programmers write software. Code is
not something they assemble painstakingly after careful planning, like the
pyramids. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly
changing their minds, like a charcoal sketch.  
  
In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast.
If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine
implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously
is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what
new ideas it gives you.  
  
It sounds like making movies works a lot like making software. Every movie is
a Frankenstein, full of imperfections and usually quite different from what
was originally envisioned. But interesting, and finished fairly quickly.  
  
I think we get away with this in movies and software because they're both
malleable mediums. Boldness pays.  And if at the last minute two parts don't
quite fit, you can figure out some hack that will at least conceal the
problem.  
  
Not so with cars, or cities. They are all too physical. If the car business
worked like software or movies, you'd surpass your competitors by making a car
that weighed only fifty pounds, or folded up to the size of a motorcycle when
you wanted to park it. But with physical products there are more constraints.
You don't win by dramatic innovations so much as by good taste and attention
to detail.  
  
The trouble is, the very word "taste" sounds slightly ridiculous to American
ears. It seems pretentious, or frivolous, or even effeminate. Blue staters
think it's "subjective," and red staters think it's for sissies. So anyone in
America who really cares about design will be sailing upwind.  
  
  
  
Twenty years ago we used to hear that the problem with the US car industry was
the workers. We don't hear that any more now that Japanese companies are
building cars in the US. The problem with American cars is bad design. You can
see that just by looking at them.  
  
All that extra sheet metal on the AMC Matador wasn't added by the workers. The
problem with this car, as with American cars today, is that it was designed by
marketing people instead of designers.  
  
Why do the Japanese make better cars than us? Some say it's because their
culture encourages cooperation. That may come into it. But in this case it
seems more to the point that their culture prizes design and craftsmanship.  
  
For centuries the Japanese have made finer things than we have in the West.
When you look at swords they made in 1200, you just can't believe the date on
the label is right. Presumably their cars fit together more precisely than
ours for the same reason their joinery always has. They're obsessed with
making things well.  
  
Not us. When we make something in America, our aim is just to get the job
done. Once we reach that point, we take one of two routes. We can stop there,
and have something crude but serviceable, like a Vise-grip. Or we can improve
it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. When we want
to make a car "better," we stick tail fins on it, or make it longer, or make
the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion.  
  
Ditto for houses. In America you can have either a flimsy box banged together
out of two by fours and drywall, or a McMansion-- a flimsy box banged together
out of two by fours and drywall, but larger, more dramatic-looking, and full
of expensive fittings. Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship;
they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.  
  
We don't especially prize design or craftsmanship here. What we like is speed,
and we're willing to do something in an ugly way to get it done fast. In some
fields, like software or movies, this is a net win.  
  
But it's not just that software and movies are malleable mediums. In those
businesses, the designers (though they're not generally called that) have more
power. Software companies, at least successful ones, tend to be run by
programmers. And in the film industry, though producers may second-guess
directors, the director controls most of what appears on the screen. And so
American software and movies, and Japanese cars, all have this in common: the
people in charge care about design-- the former because the designers are in
charge, and the latter because the whole culture cares about design.  
  
I think most Japanese executives would be horrified at the idea of making a
bad car. Whereas American executives, in their hearts, still believe the most
important thing about a car is the image it projects. Make a good car? What's
"good?" It's so _subjective._ If you want to know how to design a car, ask a
focus group.  
  
Instead of relying on their own internal design compass (like Henry Ford did),
American car companies try to make what marketing people think consumers want.
But it isn't working. American cars continue to lose market share. And the
reason is that the customer doesn't want what he thinks he wants.  
  
Letting focus groups design your cars for you only wins in the short term. In
the long term, it pays to bet on good design. The focus group may say they
want the meretricious feature du jour, but what they want even more is to
imitate sophisticated buyers, and they, though a small minority, really do
care about good design. Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the
doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do the same.  
  
Apple is an interesting counterexample to the general American trend. If you
want to buy a nice CD player, you'll probably buy a Japanese one. But if you
want to buy an MP3 player, you'll probably buy an iPod. What happened? Why
doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players? Because Apple is in the consumer
electronics business now, and unlike other American companies, they're
obsessed with good design. Or more precisely, their CEO is.  
  
I just got an iPod, and it's not just nice. It's _surprisingly_ nice. For it
to surprise me, it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No
focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.  
  
  
  
Cars aren't the worst thing we make in America. Where the just-do-it model
fails most dramatically is in our cities-- or rather, exurbs. If real estate
developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market
forces would compel them to build towns that didn't suck. But they only build
a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so
depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and
spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life.   
  
But the just-do-it model does have advantages. It seems the clear winner for
generating wealth and technical innovations (which are practically the same
thing). I think speed is the reason. It's hard to create wealth by making a
commodity. The real value is in things that are new, and if you want to be the
first to make something, it helps to work fast. For better or worse, the just-
do-it model is fast, whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of
VisiCalc in a weekend, or a real estate developer building a block of shoddy
condos in a month.  
  
If I had to choose between the just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd
probably choose just-do-it. But do we have to choose? Could we have it both
ways? Could Americans have nice places to live without undermining the
impatient, individualistic spirit that makes us good at software? Could other
countries introduce more individualism into their technology companies and
research labs without having it metastasize as strip malls? I'm optimistic.
It's harder to say about other countries, but in the US, at least, I think we
can have both.  
  
Apple is an encouraging example. They've managed to preserve enough of the
impatient, hackerly spirit you need to write software. And yet when you pick
up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem American. It's too perfect. It
seems as if it must have been made by a Swedish or a Japanese company.  
  
In many technologies, version 2 has higher resolution. Why not in design
generally? I think we'll gradually see national characters superseded by
occupational characters: hackers in Japan will be allowed to behave with a
willfulness that would now seem unJapanese, and products in America will be
designed with an insistence on taste that would now seem unAmerican. Perhaps
the most successful countries, in the future, will be those most willing to
ignore what are now considered national characters, and do each kind of work
in the way that works best. Race you.  
  
  
  
**