In the last few decades, thousands of products have entered our lives with the intention to make them simpler. So, why does so much modern technology confuse and trap us?

“Technology changes rapidly; people change slowly”, writes Donald Norman, in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. Interaction with things is governed by our biology, psychology, society, and culture. Human biology and psychology do not change much with time, and society and culture change slowly. The rate of new product creation is so high that some features aren’t tested thoroughly, or aren’t tested at all.

Bad design affects the super-complex to the dead simple: for instance, bad design is a door with a raised bar across it. The door only opens if you apply pressure on the right side of the bar, but there is no visual indication of this.

And what about a phone interface with a mysterious button ‘R’? Nobody knows what the button does, but the button remains for as long as a designer can provide a reason for its existence. Likewise, bad design is a door that has a handle which suggests twisting and pulling, but slides open.

I have been toying with the idea of modern (in)conveniences for a while before I read Norman’s book. The supermarket and the washing machine were subjects of a brief post.

Bad design, I’ve since learned, is used to confuse users intentionally. Why would a designer want to do this?

The Supermarket Maze

Supermarkets are complex, distracting, confusing. They are also exotic, amorphous and evolving ecosystems of products. The products displayed in the supermarket largely sell themselves with their packaging. Graphic design is key here – how can one peanut butter stand out from another peanut butter?

To do our shopping in the twenty-first century, we no longer need to visit individual shops. Products are gathered together within a single building. We enter a shop, pick up a basket of pre-determined size, and working from a mental or physical list, walk around the shop selecting items to put in a basket, before taking the basket to the check-out. The products are checked out by a human or a machine, or perhaps both. We exit the shop.

How can we design a supermarket to make it easy to find a desired item? Thinking in terms of pure design, I would use a clear supermarket layout, with low shelves so you can see over them, and make use of clear signposting. A shopper could, with clear layout and signposting, be sent from A to B.

A businessperson, however, would think in terms of both design and profit. It’s good business to send your shopper on a longer route from A before they reach B, so they pick up more things to take to check-out. Most shoppers are sent into a maze of distraction and advertising. In other words, supermarkets are deliberately confusing.

The Space-age Washing Machine

It shouldn’t be more complicated than putting your dirty clothes in the machine, putting in the washing powder, and pressing a button. But washing machines have become needlessly complicated, with some interfaces looking like spaceship dashboards. Norman suggests this is because ‘complicated’ looking products actually hold consumer appeal. Apparent complexity, at least in Korea, suggests status. More features, Norman argues, defies simplicity. More features sell products. A more complex washing machine is more attractive than one that appears simple. How many people try to understand how products work before they buy them?

A wonderful experience should be able to overrule these poor business tactics. Driving sales via confusion and advertising exposure is far from ideal, but it seems to work – at least in some places. Apparent complexity may always sell. The iPhone and iPod Touch, though, are examples of wonderful apparent simplicity when the device itself is complex: the good design masks the complexity of the functions.

Supermarkets rely on products selling themselves off the shelf. That’s interesting, if you combine this with the fact that product packaging is on its way out. Sainsbury’s in the UK is trying out the milk bag, which may eventually replace the plastic bottle. The milk bag is already popular in Canada (according to the article, 60% of fresh milk in Canada is sold in bags). Supermarkets are bending to the pressure of environmental awareness, but as the Times article points out, it’s down to whether consumers will want it.

It’s worth bearing in mind a scenario where packaging is severely limited, or where we simply no longer can afford to spend our resources on disposable packaging. Without products selling themselves with their packaging, will the current supermarket model work? If products can no longer sell themselves individually with their packaging, the model for advertising products in stock will have to change.

What makes design so compelling is how it emerges from seemingly conflicting motives: in these cases, the aims of the designer are at odds with the aims of business. Business itself is at odds with environmental pressure, availability of resources, the ideal of how they would advertise their product, and ultimately, what consumers want.

I’m a new student of “Experience Design”. Can you really design experiences?

One of the books I discovered in my flat a few months ago was the best-selling ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ (by Stephen Covey). The book advocates the idea of a life that is governed by “principles”, by which positive outcomes are the natural product of this way of living, and not necessarily the aim. So according to Covey, a life led by positive principles leads to positive outcomes. A similar approach can be taken towards design, in terms of experience. The idea is similar: a designer focused on human experience of the finished object, rather than “designing an object”, will produce superior work.

I’ve just started to read Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching User Experiences’. Here’s a quotation from Buxton’s website:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

For me this is a totally new and very exciting way of looking at design.

We live in terms of experiences. We are surrounded by objects that give us an experience. Le Corbusier’s opening line in his 1923 book, ‘Vers une architecture’ (towards a new architecture), is “a house is a machine for living in“. I think this is a good approach to architecture. A house is a machine for living in, and a house is populated by various other man-made things such as a bed, a bookcase, a bedside table, a lamp. We experience a lamp when we attempt to turn it on and off. We experience a bed when we lie on it. We experience a bookcase when we put our books in it. If we can identify the components of what makes an experience good, then experiences are designable.

Objects we choose to surround ourselves with are, on the whole, man made; and they are objects which we have selected ourselves. We select these objects because they are easy to use, cheap, practical, aesthetically-pleasing, or all of these things. In other words, we choose to surround ourselves with objects that give us a pleasant experience. A designer who designs with this experience in mind is looking at the top of the hierarchy of everything a designer should be thinking about. Design exists to give human beings a good experience, whether it’s an entire city, a map to navigate the city, a dictionary, or a clear dictionary typeface.

I think a big enemy for designers is distraction, or approaching a problem with an existing agenda or idea in mind. Role-models (i.e. famous graphic designers, artists, architects) and inspirational objects (i.e. examples of existing examples that you admire by famous graphic designers, artists, architects) can distract and obscure, rather than clarify and help. By focusing on experience, the designer has a clear canvas. Good experience is the aim, and it doesn’t matter how you reach this aim. It includes both function and aesthetics, as both are necessary for a good experience, and both are necessary for a good design.

Experience design is very relevant to mobile design, and even more so as the small screen attempts an increasingly ambitious portfolio of capabilities that the desktop/laptop computer can already do. Designing applications that provide the user with a delightful experience is one thing. Working out how to deal with the desktop-scaled web on a small screen is another. I’m looking forward to giving this more thought…

Here are three books that I read in the last year and found to be inspiring and valuable additions to my bookshelf.

Adrian Shaughnessy: How to be a graphic designer: without losing your soul
I would say, straight off, that if you’re a graphic designer, you must read this book. Own a copy. Illustrator Siggi Eggertsson said that its awesome design made him suspicious of the quality of the content, but the content is at least as good as its design. It works as a handbook, a resource for inspiration, and gives solid and practical advice. It covers how to set up your own design studio (with helpful diagrams), and how to handle job interviews. Here is a very good interview with Shaughnessy that focuses on his book.

As for the book title, I think it is apt: ‘losing your soul’ (I think it means becoming disillusioned with your craft, which is easy enough to do) is a danger in everything, and in a profession that is primarily preoccupied with surfaces, it’s especially precarious. This book did a great job at inspiring me, and hopefully other designers will find it useful, too.

[Amazon UK: How to Be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul]

Robin Kinross: Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography
This happened to be one of the books I picked off the shelf while I was researching for my dissertation, and was a fantastic find. Self-published, and with no less authority (perhaps more?), Kinross’ ‘Unjustified texts’ gathers together 25 years’ worth of writing on the themes of editorial typography, the emergence of graphic design in Britain, and the work of modernist designers.

This is an unusual and smart collection of writings that I’d recommend to designers who are interested in history and culture. The essays also deal with the recognition and definition of graphic design as a profession, and the writings are no less relevant to the current day and even the future.

[Amazon UK: Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography] [Hyphen Press]

Christopher Burke: Paul Renner: the art of typography
Originally Burke’s PhD thesis, Burke converted his ideas into a highly readable and beautifully-designed book. It is the only biography on Paul Renner, the designer of the typeface Futura. Although not as widely used as Helvetica, geometric sans-serif Futura has been prominently (over)used in advertising and across visual culture since its creation in 1927. Burke argues that Futura was a product of the classic German third way: an answer to the conflict of Roman (western) type, and German gothic blackletter. This was highly contentious in Germany in the early twentieth-century. The political and social forces behind the creation of Futura are compelling, and Burke does a fantastic job at revealing them. Here is a longer review of this book at Typebooks.

[Amazon UK: Paul Renner: The Art of Typography]

What about this blog…?
I like to think about the design of everything, including blog posts. I’m still thinking about how I should approach writing here. I started this blog in November 2007, and now it is March 2008. That’s not bad going, but you’d think I’d have made my mind up by now. I’m still undecided on how to approach posting here: whether I should post highly-polished essays and articles, or to use it as a notebook, or to somehow use it for both. I suppose I’ll see how my needs and interests dictate it. But I know I should write consistently so anyone who wants to follow my blog knows exactly what to expect. That’s what I like when I subscribe to a blog, anyway. Consistency. Oh, and genuine value.

Whether or not I’m in a university, I’m an eternal student. So this blog is a great platform for me to write my thoughts and ideas up, even if their nature — shooting from the hip — is rather flawed, disconnected, or dead wrong. I’ll do my best not to be any of that, especially not wrong, because I hate being wrong. But I don’t want anything I write to be too polished: I aim for a relaxed, self-effacing tone that acknowledges and forgives errors, because this blog is iterative, like the design process itself.

Using this blog as a research tool…
I’m not interested in re-reporting current affairs, or regurgitating and commenting on recent news (unless I have something unique to say). I think I’m interested in the bigger picture, regarding trends. It’s more likely that I’d want to dig up articles and websites and ideas from years ago and comment on them.

Images and words are at the core of everything I’m interested in. Recently, I’m reading a lot about business — simply because it falls in with the implementation of design and technology. Numbers don’t interest me much, but strategy, systems, and design and implementation of systems, I find fascinating.

I’m interested in social informatics and anthropology of communication. Social aspects of technology have always been an interest, but now I have two clever-sounding terms to label them. Social aspects of communication/technology fits in perfectly with mobile related themes, and I am beginning to read around and into the topic.

Blog and book recommendations on this topic, or related topics described in this post, are encouraged and very, very welcome.