Make A Claim And Substantiate It

With the recent globalisation and synchronisation of our modern consumer world, people often become much less aware of their actions in a world where one design feature often means the same thing in any context, such as the use of a door where a doorknob would afford twisting and a flat door would afford pushing. In this project, I shall look into the development of the objects which we use every day in our modern world from the viewpoint of “affordances” and how users are able to recognise how an object is used as a result of repetitive application of design solutions.

I will argue that this acceptance for reuse of the same techniques in our everyday lifestyle is causing the pubic to spiral into a life devoid of any real, thoughtful interaction with their surroundings. Imagine the turmoil which would occur if anyone were to come across a door with a doorknob which had to be pushed upward instead of the normal twisting motion. We are no longer truly experiencing and learning through trial and error, rather being told that there is only one way to do things.

I shall evaluate this theme with consideration for the theme of design and the social – what designers can learn from sociologists and anthropologists. With reference to “The Design of Everyday Things,” written by cognitive scientist Donald Norman, I shall demonstrate the simplicity of design in our lives and relate it back to an anthropological view into the inner workings of our day-to-day mindset using also “The Evolution of Useful Things” by Henry Petroski, an engineer who researches success and failure in design. I believe that only through a sociological study can we truly understand the depths of influence which everyday design has had on modern society.

Figure 1 Diversity of fork designs. (Petroski, H. 1992)

When it comes to the design of commonplace objects, we often don’t realise the fact that things were never always the same way as they are now. Over the course of time, different people and different societies have dealt with different problems and different solutions, where many of these problems have arisen from the “solutions” of a previous generation. Henry Petroski sums it up when he postulates an alternative to the idea that “form follows function” where he says that, instead, “form follows failure”. He accompanies this idea with reference to the development of the fork. There have been many different iterations of the fork with different shapes, quantity of tines, grip sizes and lengths. So why now do we often only see the standard length, four-tine fork everywhere we go? Is this the ultimate final product? Or have we just accepted the design which was most popular at the time of modern globalisation, making more people resistant to changing something so widespread. How would we react to being given one of the less common forks displayed in the example?

Another example which we use every day in the modern world is the computer keyboard. This was developed during the creation of the typewriter and the common “QWERTY” layout was invented by Christopher Scholes. He designed the layout in such a way that the most common two letter combinations were on the opposite sides of the keyboard, purposefully hindering the writer from being able to formulate text too quickly for fear of the typewriter jamming. This may have been relevant at the time of the typewriter, but why has it survived to be still in use in our modern times, even though there is no longer any problem with people being able to type as fast as possible on a normal computer. This is a theme which is covered in "The Evolution of Useful Things" as Donald Norman goes over the psychology behind failure and success of an object. The idea is that society, now that it has become more globalised, is less able to bring about change because of its lack of willingness, thus the hardest task for a designer is implementing change onto an object which is already commonplace for an audience which is resistant to change, even if it may be for the better.

References:

Norman, D. (1998). The Design of Everyday Things. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Petroski, H. (2010). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.