wooky

I started writing this before seeing other comments but I guess I'll finish it - Design is much more of a case-by-case issue than you seem to be making it, and in many cases it's definitely just as important as the engineering.

Going with your icing on the cake analogy, design isn't just the icing, but arguably the plate and utensil you're given to eat the cake. You could bake a top-notch cake, but if you're given a piece of paper and a hair curler as utensils, you'll have quite the shitter of a cake-eating experience.

What I mean/what I'm sure you've heard before/what design school students pay $160k in tuition to learn is that the purpose of design isn't its artistic aspects of making something pretty, it's meant more to facilitate the process of using a product.

And not to be an ass, but I'd say all three of your examples are shit, design was a huge driving factor in each of their success. Google's one bar/one button was a stark contrast to Yahoo trying to corral the entire internet onto their homepage. Facebook's design/UI might look shit in retrospect, but that uniform layout was definitely the primary reason for the mass migration from MySpace's load time hell of profiles littered with clipart and whiny post-punk/emo set to autoplay. Microsoft has made some of the ugliest shit known to mankind, but its core product is literally named after its design, giving users "Windows" so they can spend less time fucking everything up in DOS.

In regards to your edit, though, I definitely agree. So much of the design process can end up being determined at the engineer or executive level to the point where evaluating the design team to gauge a company's health is just identifying the turd polishers. And "design team morale" is such a god damn stupid and difficult thing to evaluate since it might be the result of any number of misleading or erroneous factors ranging from the soda machine running out of Pepsi to the team itself being a tight-knit group of lazy incompetents who interview well.

Pop culture is inherently "pastiche".

To think of pop culture contextually, it's really only been a phenomenon we've experienced for the past century or so, depending on how you want to define "pop culture", but I'd say the advent of radio and cinema would be a good starting marker.

So, making claims about what pop culture is "supposed to be" are somewhat frivolous since we are still very much in the process of defining that. However, at this specific point in 2015, I would agree that we're falling into "an emptiness in contemporary pop culture" more so than ever before - but that emptiness has always kind of been there.

Take Elvis, for example. The author made repeated examples of Bruno Mars and Pharrell, but in a more abstract sense of the term, Elvis was the king of pastiche, most of his hits either being Blues/R&B/Soul covers or written by someone else. Considering Elvis as one of the first major acts in manifesting the phenomenon of pop culture, it's pretty fair to identify pop culture as an entity which capitalizes on previous work. The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Nirvana - the most successful pop acts have followed a formula of commercializing genre tropes.

I understand the author's main point that, in the most current critique of contemporary pop music, the 2010s feel more empty and less innovative as opposed to having a branded identity like the grunge of the early '90s, the (now retro-)futuristic visions of the '80s, et cetera. While the "EDM" movement may refute that, I think the bigger issue is that with today's level of exposure to different cultures, Americans are less "forced" to subscribe to pop culture.

Innovation doesn't happen in pop culture - pop culture just capitalizes on it and brings it exposure. Nirvana were a talented group but hardly the first "grunge" band, and if you've seen Dave Grohl's Sonic Highways, Sub Pop was actually a little surprised that these guys were the group to nationalize the grunge scene, when several other bands under the label were just as qualified. Michael Jackson was obviously talented as well, but a lot of his success can be attributed to Quincy Jones building off Disco's pioneering and nudging it into a "poppier" format.

Maybe we're reaching a point where the general public is no longer so dependent on "pop culture" as a means of exposure to something "new" or "innovative," where we don't have to sit through hours of Peter Gabriel and Cyndi Lauper music videos, hoping something by NWA will pop up on MTV, or where hearing something outside the same 7 songs the radio is such a jarring experience that we almost have to like the new member of the rotation by default. This is probably why the music industry is having a bit of a difficult time as well. With such a wider accessibility to culture, a byproduct seems to be that the general public is growing more cognizant of the "pastiche" of pop. (That doesn't mean we can't enjoy that Bruno Mars song, though)