Sustainability/Beauty vs. Utility/Economics/Quantity - what do you value more?

[PepperBlossoms]

Do you value something that focuses on sustainability and beauty (which tends to be upfront more expensive and require unique taylored approaches) or something that is upfront cheaper, covers more people, and more cookie cutter?

By tending to put the focus on making things cheap, we are sometimes creating ugly products/cities/homes but yet they are affordable, more people can use them, it requires less skill to make, and it is quicker.

To go with beauty and sustainability, it takes longer.  It can be more inspiring, creative, lovely, intelligent, etc. though.

When we are creating without concern for the aesthetics or psychological, social, environmental impact - - hence we have lots of carbon in the air, homes on top of each other, high crime, poor quality things, flooding, etc.

Would you rather leave your mark on adding to the beauty or would you rather leave your mark on trying to help the most people and hence do something that is accessible to the most people, most likely very utilitarian - but possibly not beautiful/sustainable in the long run?

What to you is more enjoyable, purposeful?

I can see the benefits and value to both.

I can see that we would want to be able to integrate both as much as we can - and that if there is no consideration at all for one, it can be an issue.

Some beauty is great but it is only so beautiful based on the cost that may make it ugly in terms of being out of price range - - but some stuff may be so ugly that it is too costly for the impact it is going to have.

[aurum]

@PepperBlossoms

We’ve definitely swung as a society in the direction of “cheap, easy” over “beautiful and sustainable”. So I suspect a correction is coming.

The problem is, even if people want to create something “beautiful and sustainable”, they often are economically incentivized to do the exact opposite.

So what I think needs to happen is that economics needs to be realigned with beauty. We want our economics incentivizing beauty, not the other way around.

And there may be some hard limits to that realignment. But we haven’t hit them yet. We’ve collectively barely even tried.

[Lews Therin]

Capitalism will always favor the cheaper option, even when we already produce enough riches as a society to build something beautyfull for everyone.

That won't happen under capitalism though, we nees some sort of socialist revival to move us from game a to game b.

[PepperBlossoms]

If the sustainable type work is very expensive, takes a long time, and requires very high skill, it may not be as sustainable in terms of - it would take too long and too costly to meet the demanding needs of society - - but yet we are not really trying a whole lot as @aurum said so if we required it upfront for building/production requirements, it may have a learning and integration curve but then once that hump is jumped by industry professionals, it may be more attainable and then once done more commonly because it is required, the whole process could get cheaper and be more sought out as it would make a more beautiful product.  

We have lots of rules for building for safety/structural relations but not a whole lot of rules regarding beauty/sustainability.  Regulation for this would get pushback by those that do not want more regulation or pay more money for things.

I can see that it may actually NOT be sustainable to spend so much effort on making a few things sustainable at the expense of not having enough time to get that for everything else - -

For homes, we have a few very expensive beautiful, sustainable, LEED, solar panel, intelligently designed/crafted homes that the wealthy enjoy and then there is the cheap, quick homes that all look the same that the middle class enjoys.  Is there anything wrong with making something that looks like everything else to go for quantity instead of actually taking one's time to do something fascinating and create a very unique product?

We will have to make sustainable/beauty extremely affordable otherwise we will probably keep on choosing price over holistic long term impact in terms of capitalism as @Lews Therin said- - unless we factor in more things to the price/long term impact.  I guess the builders/designers themselves would have to have a value system of beauty over money.  

A lot of it also just has to do with - the people working on these projects are young and are still learning but the people they are learning from and being managed by didn't value beauty and so the young aren't learning how to build something in that way and then we get more and more cheap things.  And then the young grow up and just keep on doing the same methods they were taught and then teach those methods to the young after them.

If we look to other places, castles were beautiful and expensive but it was at the expense of everyone else being dirt poor and in bad living conditions - - so it needs a balance possibly of not spending too much time on one thing and evening out the type of thing and effort put forth to benefit the most people.