I am not sure why I suddenly had the idea that I needed to look more into “design”. I think I was reading the absolutely beautiful magazine The Road Rat - which is a study in great design and in many ways is as much a design or photography magazine as a car-one.
I have always loved cars and especially loved great and/quirky designs. This love of great design goes beyond cars and merges into bikes, furniture, buildings etc. but the underlying appreciation of great design has always been the same.
One book that comes to mind when talking about both design, cars and engineering is the amazing book How to build a car by Adrian Newey. Even though it is a lot more on the technical and engineering side of design it is still a brilliant resource for creative thinking.
But having read that I looked for some more “general” design book. If nothing else, then to see if I could find it interesting enough to follow through or I needed some more specific design book towards the industries or areas that interests me.
Reading Design of Everyday Things
After some light searching I stumbled upon the book by Don Norman called The Design of Everyday Things which I picked up. There may be better books, but I have to start somewhere and as my life-situation is currently, it has to be something I can read at night on my recently acquired Kobo Clara BW and this book seemed to fit.
So these are my notes or reflections on the first reading session I had with the book.
Good vs bad design
I love and fully agree with his statements about good design is difficult to see because it gets out of the way. Of course we can spot a beautiful car, but in the design of everyday things like doors, refrigerators etc. the general way of spotting a good design is because we do not notice them at all. They just get out of the way. What we do notice however is bad design. That will get in our way constantly and annoy us.
Affordance
He then speaks about a term called “affordance”. I have not encountered it in this context before, but it does make good sense to me.
Affordance is what the object affords the user. As he emphasizes it is always in relation to the user. A door affords entrance or exit to a user. But if it is too heavy for the user, then it does not afford entrance or exit for that user.
Signifiers
Signifier are signals to the user about affordance. This could be a sign on the door saying “push”. But it could also be a voice saying “please push the door” or it could be years of use that had left a clear mark of other people pushing on the door.
Signifiers communicate what the designer want the user to do. Or which options the designer wants the user to be aware of.
The important part here is that signifiers cannot “override” affordance. Meaning even if there is a very big “push” written on the door, it will not afford someone entrance that is not strong enough to push the door open.
The first two here stood out very clearly (affordance and signifiers) as they made sense and I could see why you would have them. The rest of the total of 6 (if I remember correctly) were a little bit more vague or did not register as important as this one.
Mapping
Then he goes into mapping which I found a little less “important” apart from the part about mappings also being cultural. Meaning that some mappings are culturally linked and may not mean the same to people of different cultures.
For some reason this made me think of a curious, but in my opinion rather big error in the construction of a building here in Denmark where I am from.
I worked as a consultant for a very big Danish bank and they had this big new headquarters built on a very fancy address in Copenhagen. Inside the building there were these winding staircases going up through the many levels of the building. What quickly became apparent after only being there very few times was how often people seemed to almost bump in to each other on the staircases. It was like people going down always selected the same side to walk on as people going up.
After enough examples of seeing this to confirm that it was really an issue I started thinking more deliberately about why this might be. The stairs wind to the left going up, meaning counter-clockwise and they are tight winding stairs that winds all the way to the middle leaving narrow steps to the inside.
As we drive to the right in Denmark, the most obvious way to pass each other is on the right. This means that going up, you will have the widest part of the step on the stairs.
And herein lies the issue!
Because with a staircase, especially one that has a narrow and a wide part, you will want the wide part for going down. Going up, it does not matter, you can put your feet into very narrow steps. So with a staircase that winds counter-clockwise going up it of course winds the different way going down. This means that when you go down you have the widest part of the staircase to the left. And hence people will naturally walk on the left part of the staircase going down.
This works brilliantly in countries where you drive on the left, because you would also walk on the left. So people would naturally use the narrow part to walk up and the wide part going down. Everything is in perfect order.
But. When you install such a winding staircase in a part of the World where people drive and hence naturally walks to the right, then you have the issue. People going up will naturally walk on the right - meaning the widest part - and hence will “bump” into people going down, that will walk to their left because that is where the steps are widest.
So what I personally expect has happened is that the contractor has put in a staircase that would normally be used in England but instead installed it in a building in Denmark and hence everyone has to move over and shuffle back and forth all the time during the entire lifetime of the building.
Great design you would not notice - bad design - you do.
End of chapter 1
I think this somewhat concludes my memory and notes of chapter 1. The beginning of the chapter was better than the end. I am curious to see if the book can keep me interested or whether I should switch to a book that is more engineering or automotive design focused.