If you're going to go to the effort of making something that is useful, I don't think going the extra mile to make it beautiful is wasted effort. I don't think

If you're going to go to the effort of making something that is useful, I don't think going the extra mile to make it beautiful is wasted effort. I don't think anyone could really argue that going in the other direction is a good thing, squeezing something functional into an aesthetically beautiful shell (though that is obviously very common amongst young designers [and Philippe Starck]). But taking something useful, and carefully designing the look and feel of it to be beautiful is a more than reasonable thing to do; it invokes desire.