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I recently read an opinion piece in Wired that I couldn’t put out of mind. The title seemed loud and controversial enough to suit the mood of the magazine: “If Design’s No Longer the Killer Differentiator, What Is?” I know, every third article in Wired prophesies the end of technology as we know it, along with the imminent rise of the Next Big Thing. But this one was different. The brief piece, an argument for a renewed investment in artistic values in the marketplace by RISD president and former MIT Media Lab researcher, John Maeda, couldn’t be easily written off as the usual futurist speculation.

Maeda knows his stuff. From his perch atop the nation’s most elite art school, he’s in an exalted enough position to make pronouncements like, “…designed objects and experiences have become the norm—some would even say boring. Design is no longer the killer differentiator.” Nothing too outlandish in this statement, although it struck me as a bit smug. Anyone designing hardware, devices and UX after Apple has to think about design and ease of use. But when good design is done formulaically by everyone, it recedes into the background. I’m with him so far. Maeda takes the next logical step and asks, what’s next? Here’s where his bird’s eye view of things could benefit from a little nuance.

Good design is not enough, Maeda argues. To be competitive products need to impart values, particularly, the values he associates with the artist—integrity, an experimental, probing nature, an unwavering pursuit of “truth”—values Maeda locates in the late Steve Jobs, whom he hails as the “iconic CEO-as-artist”. Furthermore, we’re willing to pay a little more for products made by a company that imparts these values, which he refers to playfully as a “tithe”. Apple is that company, a company with vision and integrity, a company guided by an irascible, visionary artist. You don’t have to be a philistine to reject this weird rhetoric.

Blinded by Apple’s success, Maeda seems to have taken the company’s public image to heart. One idea pushed by Apple is that Creatives gravitate to their products, while bland corporate types prefer their competitor’s merely functional products. Another idea circulating in the wake of Job’s death is that the man may have been a “mercurial asshole”, but he refused to compromise his vision of the future of technology at the service of mere profits. Jobs gave technology the human touch, the artist’s touch. If nothing else, both of these half-truths are examples of Jobs’ marketing genius. Suppose Apple hadn’t ballooned into the most profitable company in the world? Would Jobs still be remembered as a visionary “CEO-as-artist”, or as an also-ran? How will Apple evolve without Jobs’ strong, micro-managing hand? These questions may turn out to be inconsequential, but Maeda fails to raise a more important question: What other factors may have contributed to Apple’s record profits? And how do these factors resonate with the “values” of the typical consumer?

It’s well known that Apple’s supply chain in China has a few “awkward links”. Unfortunately for Apple, Foxconn has by now become a household name. I should think that a company banking on its professed values would do more than just admonish a supplier that has had to put up nets to catch workers attempting to commit suicide at a factory where its products are manufactured. At the risk of sounding passé, I won’t even bring up the divestment in American manufacturing and job creation that this arrangement with Chinese suppliers represents. Maybe I’m too near-sighted to see that Jobs made those decisions for the greater good, after all, an artist, and by extension a CEO-as-artist, is “someone who often exchanges his own welfare and even his life for a cause that may have no meaning to anyone else, but means everything to him or her.” Not only is this outrageously messianic stuff, it’s also conflated with the most clichéd myth in art history. Yikes. Now you see why I couldn’t let Maeda off the hook, considering his elite stature and influence.

To suggest that we’ve become so jaded with designed experiences and products that we now look to our selfless CEOs for salvation is clearly absurd. But it does help illustrate how we’ve been lulled into taking our high standard of living—including our design and technology standards here in the US—for the norm. This is most apparent in places like San Francisco and Cambridge, where iPhones far outnumber factory workers, hack-a-thons spill over into cafes, and zero emissions buses glide noiselessly through it all. Perhaps this is the present Maeda imagines all of us to be experiencing. It’s certainly not the reality in the factory towns where Apple products are made. I agree with the basic premise of Maeda’s article, that companies shouldn’t be resting on their design laurels alone, but I’d put the emphasis on a different set of values: Sustainability, social equity, and good global citizenship. I don’t think that’s too grandiose to ask of companies, and of ourselves. Let’s acknowledge that we all play a role in designing this thing.

Author Bio : Dan Shurley practices website design in Philadelphia and writes for his company’s blog Sitegeist.