“I see it as an experiment and a criticism”
>> Sure, it’s an experiment – if you reread the above, you’ll see that I got nothing against that kind of approach. But it’s an experiment that is stupid and that failed badly.

Calling a failed experiment a “critique” is a pretty callow way out of criticism of the original failure. This is stock post-modernism: there are no rules/there is no truth, therefore there can be no criticism; and if the failure is too obvious to avoid, you can fall back on ironic distance (That’s terrible. But it’s new! But it’s still terrible. Well, I didn’t mean it in the first place, it was a critique of terribleness). That’s one way to approach things, but it does nothing for me.

“Beauty is always subjective, but innovation (however odd or “ugly” it may seem), is still innovation.”
>> If you reread the above, you’ll see that I’m not arguing beauty or ugliness; and I’m not against innovation.

But, innovation is not always a virtue. As seen above, the only goal was innovation (which is really pretty easy to achieve). Great, they succeeded in creating something new – they created something stupid and bad, but at least it’s new. So it’s new, big deal. It’s also crap.

David Carson successfully captured the energy of the new sport of snowboarding. It was great, innovative, stuff, but it also did work within that innovation. It wasn’t just new, it communicated in a way that this kind of shit does not. Not many people can really pull off pure style, but he was certainly one of ‘em.

Stefan Sagmeister has never made anything that I cared about at all. It all seems like a first year design student’s first idea. I guess we could applaud him for retaining a kind of naive energy, but it would be (to my mind) exactly the same amount of applause we would give to a first year design student: not much.

In short, novelty is easy and we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on it. Novelty for its own sake is design up its own asshole (q.v. Sagmeister), and nobody needs that.