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Bottom Line vs. Beauty Earlier this week, I shared a quote on social media from Mary Thompsonās Reclaiming the Wild Soul (HT Lori Wallace): āBottom-line thinking cares nothing for beauty. Concerned with profits and growth, it favors malls over meadows, missiles over museums, and fossil fuels over fresh air. This 'clear' thinking is the cause of so much pollutionāboth internal and externalā¦But what if we rebelled?ā She goes on to elaborate: āWhat if we subjected every action, every notion, to the question posed by theologian Carolyn Gifford: āIs what we are doing, is what I am doing, beautiful or not?āā How does that apply to those of us working in tech? Well, at a concrete level, beautiful user interfaces may be perceived as more usable. According to the Aesthetic-Usability Effect, āUsers often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design thatās more usable.ā Some would argue that beautiful code is more readable (though that would of course depend on how you define beauty and readability). When asked what makes a program beautiful in Coders at Work, Fran Allen responds, āThat it is a simple straightforward solution to a problem; that has some intrinsic structure and obviousness about it that isnāt obvious from the problem itself.ā Even in those examples, though, weāre in some way tying beauty to the bottom line. Letās zoom out a bit. Is the product Iām creating or the blog post Iām writing contributing to a more beautiful world? Or am I adding clutter and distraction? Am I having a beautiful interaction with a fellow human being? Or am I just groaning my way through yet another āmeeting that could have been an emailā? In some cases, our mindset is what makes the difference. In our quest for efficiency, I feel we software engineers too often neglect beauty, and there are consequences. As Victoria Moran writes, ā[B]eauty is not an insignificant extra or a luxury one can do without. Beauty is a human need.ā Thereās clearly a balance to strike. Quest for You So my challenge to you for the next two weeksāpause to look for beauty, whatever that means to you! Feel free to share photos or descriptions of what you find, whether itās in the code or in the woods.
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