as anything can get. But design is emotion. I mean, that’s what good design does—it stirs emotions.” Teddy looked around for a way to illustrate his point; his gaze fell on Romeo’s cheap and incredibly boring pen. Teddy snatched it and held the pen up before Romeo could stop him.
“What do you feel when you look at this?”
“Feel?”
“Yeah. Like, what comes to mind? Or to heart.”
Romeo blinked at him. “Um, I need it to write with.”
“Anything else?”
“I...guess I get annoyed when they suddenly run out of ink.” He looked a little lost. “I like blue ink better than black,” he added with what appeared to be a smidgen of hope.
“Right.” Teddy set down Romeo’s pen and held his own aloft instead. “Now what do you feel?”
“Um...it’s pretty? The gold stuff is kind of cool.” Romeo grabbed the pen away and tilted it this way and that, watching the flakes float. He seemed almost hypnotized by the motion, in fact, until he jerked his shoulders and put the pen back on the desk. “I have no idea what you’re getting at, man.”
Teddy suppressed an irritated huff. “I told you. Emotion. Both of our pens can write. Maybe yours is even better at it. Mine uses these special ink inserts that don’t last very long. But yours is, like, the most ho-hum thing in the universe, whereas mine is pretty cool. If you lost your pen or someone stole it, you wouldn’t care as long as you had something else to write with. If I lost mine, I’d be seriously bummed. And that’s design, Mr. Blue. It makes you feel something.”
Romeo tapped his fingers on the desk. “Fine. You’re emotionally attached to your writing instrument. So?”
“So, how much did your pen cost?” When Romeo just stared at him, Teddy waved a hand. “Yeah, I know. You got it out of the supply cabinet. But I happen to know you can buy a sixty pack of them for less than ten bucks. That comes to...” He tried to do the math in his head.
“Seventeen cents each.”
“Right,” said Teddy, who didn’t actually know if the figure was accurate. It was close enough, for his purposes. “Seventeen cents. My pen, on the other hand? Nine ninety-nine, plus tax.”
Romeo pursed his lips disapprovingly. “You could’ve bought sixty of mine for the price and never freak out if you lost one.”
“True. But mine was just a little splurge. Some people pay hundreds for Montblancs. You know—just like rich people will fork over a hundred grand for a Mercedes when a Ford Fiesta will also get them from point A to point B.”
Teddy was really warming to his subject, so much that he’d stood up and was waving his arms around as if he were delivering a TED Talk. But Romeo didn’t make an appreciative audience. He was squinting at Teddy. “What does this have to do with our job?”
With a sigh, Teddy sank back into the chair. “Nobody needs a vase. I mean, you don’t even need fresh flowers, but if you do have them, you can stick them in anything. A drinking glass, an empty soup can...whatever. But our goal is for people to want to buy our vase. To see it in a magazine or on a store shelf and think, ‘Jeez, I wish I owned that!’ We want people to add it to their wish lists and drop hints to family members when their birthdays are coming near. And how do we do that? By making them feel something about our vase.”
“And we do that via good design,” Romeo said.
“Yes!” Teddy felt as if he’d scored a touchdown or nailed a winning free throw or achieved something else sports related. Not that he’d ever excelled at any of those things—riding his scooter being the sum of his athletic pursuits—but he could imagine the sensation.
Romeo, on the other hand, didn’t look pleased at all. He was staring at a spot somewhere over Teddy’s left shoulder, where Teddy knew perfectly well there was nothing to see except a blank white wall. “What if that Mercedes has no engine?” Romeo’s voice was even, almost emotionless. “What if your pen leaks ink everywhere? People still might feel something about the products, but those feelings are going to be negative. And nobody’s going to want to buy.”
Teddy considered pointing out that even negative feelings were something. Lots of famous designs earned their fame, a least in part, due to the heated—and not always positive—reactions they engendered. Architects such as