Lately, I’ve been watching an unhealthy amount of HGTV, thus signaling the downward slide into a life of khaki shorts and lawn-based discussions with other men wearing polo shirts. God save me now.

But for all the mindless drivel on there, amidst the bold sinks of Kohler and terror-inducing moldy drywall alerts, I’ve been hopelessly addicted to Design Star. It’s this year’s Laguna Beach! Ok, not really.

As much as I loathe reality shows, I found this one to be engaging, but not for the interpersonal drama that most cultivate and harvest like brain crack. Instead, the show really just focused on the drive of each designer during the contest. Sure they peppered it with a little drama, but for Pete’s sake, you can’t have designers without drama, can you? That’s just too much to ask.

But in all it’s interestingness, I can’t help but be reminded about my main issue with design. Technically, I just have a problem digesting the concept of design in the theoretical. Let’s take an example “mission” from the show.

Each designer is given an isolated, 8x8ish room consisting of the same contents: white walls, couch, bookcase, and table. They’ve given a theme to interpret and allowed to go at it.* And while David’s room blew the living snot out of the rest, despite having to gain inspiration from a pet supply store, you can’t help but realize how impractical this all is.

Look through a Pottery Barn magazine, a West Elm catalog or Southern Living Edition. Notice anything? Well besides some beautifully adorned rooms with a breezy, effortless look. That’s the point. Theoretically perfect design, done in vacuum with unlimited tools at your disposal, is flawless. But how is that problem solving?

Only in the land of photo shoots and reality shows does this confined, sterilized brand of interior design succeed. Unless you simply bought everything in one spread of that Pottery Barn magazine, trinkets and all, or unless you threw all of your existing decor out and dropped $10k (a budget from the show for a project) on brand-new everything… In reality, everyone has accumulated pieces of previous design. Very few people have houses with a million windows, rich hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings.

All in all, it’s simply the battle between theoretical and practical design. The runways of the world are filled with fashions that grace the bodies of but a handful of anorexic waifs, not the JCrew or Gap’s of the world (which is closer to what the vast majority of people are buying). Theoretically perfect design (fashion, graphic, interior, etc) does nothing, in my opinion, to solve the real problems in life. So how can it be judged successful if it simply negates this? Just as medicines that fail to perform outside of the labs and calculations are deemed inappropriate for consumption, so should design of the same vain. Why feed us images of unattainable style? Oh, to make money.

I realize a business needs to make money, and thus make their products look spectacular. But as a designer, I just see no point in creating something that’s not useful to 90% of your audience (*cough* gratuitous Flash web sites).

Anyway, the show was still interesting, and I’ll likely have El Tivo grab next season’s episodes. And I’m sure I’ll still be whining about all this still.

*all of this is approximated. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the details of the room.