Design Surrounds Us

Design surrounds us. But it is not always seen—instead, it is experienced. And that can be for better or for worse. Truthfully, we tend not to notice design (i.e., the immense intentionality behind everyday experiences) unless there is an overt design failure drawing our attention to the matter. In which case, of course, we suddenly all become engineers and architects full of constructive criticism.

Who the hell designed this? Purdue engineers would never—

I remember thinking that exact line, nearly two years ago as I was heading to the airport with a 25-pound suitcase in tow, across bridge after bridge in Venice, Italy. It wasn’t until I was approaching the airport, though, that I reconciled with a surprisingly modern bridge that elicited the worst frustration. Because that surprisingly modern bridge—let me tell you, it had no business being so poorly designed.

It was tiered with miniature, step-like fixtures every two-to-four feet on the ascent. So I simply couldn’t roll my suitcase, other tourists couldn’t roll theirs, and in having to try and stop at each step, haul it up to the next, and then roll onwards another two feet—it was an embarrassing traffic jam (and also an embarrassing display of upper-body strength).

Perhaps whoever designed it simply wanted to laugh at the tourists as they exited the city.

Because it certainly wasn’t because the designer sought genuine solutions for efficiency, traffic-flow, and accessibility for the masses while entering the airport. I have since learned that this interaction was the result of failed industrial design, the optimization of systems for mutual benefit.

One observation I’ve made, whether it be regarding a silly bridge or the latest iPhone updates, is that we have to reconcile our desire to push the envelope with our desire to maintain intuitive, familiar functioning. It was not until I began reading Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things that instances like this were put into perspective for me.

The primary take away is that simplicity is key, right? But how can we apply that to a world that is always pushing forward? A world insistent on complicating itself for the sake of supposedly making our lives easier?

Comments

Why Professional Writing?

How did I end up here? As I've gotten closer to graduating from college, I've had people ask me how I ended up on the path that I'm on and why I made the decisions that I did. It still makes me laugh a bit when someone asks me those questions because truthfully, I've never felt like I knew what I was doing. The short answer is that I continually made decisions that I thought would make me happier in the long run. When I applied to Purdue, I already knew I didn't want to go there. No offense, Purdue, but I grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'd promised to my parents for eight years that I would be moving away for college. To my utter dismay, after all of the college applications had been submitted and returned, I found myself needing to make a decision between going to an out of state college (my dream) and taking out student loans, or staying here and graduating debt-free. I'm here, so obviously I chose the latter. Applying to the Professional Writing ...

Disney+ Relies on Users Already Understanding Streaming

Disney+ did not officially launch until November 2019. At that point, streaming giants such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO were already streaming giants, and Disney throwing its hat into the streaming ring was only advantageous because the company’s movie and TV collection are extremely popular. This basically guaranteed the site would be successful no matter how the interface looked. While the decision to copy a lot of the design off of other sites, especially Netflix, might seem like a good decision, Disney+ also should consider that there could be new users that are not accustomed to streaming services that are dipping their toe into the pool with Disney+ for the first time. Whether the reasons be financial or due to lack of interest in what the aforementioned sites have to offer, this group of users should be considered too. The design of Disney+ mirrors Netflix in many ways. The sites are closer to each other in terms of design than any other combination of streamin...

Writing Professionally Outside of Professional Writing

In an earlier entry, I noted that one of my vivid memories from my time in professional writing comes from the ironic realization that I was doing very little writing throughout one of my courses. Instead, this computer-aided publishing class mainly focused on the design of text and other content that already existed, with the actual writing in the class dealing with the decisions that went into the creation or modification of any presented design. In a sense, this course therefore focused more on the overall user experience of a document—how the user would view all the words and paragraphs and content as a whole—rather than how one would create the technical written elements that were necessary to form the document in the first place. Perhaps to balance this out, then, I want to discuss a recent writing experience that I find to be almost thematically opposite. One of the classes I took this semester was Purdue’s software engineering class, described on the university’s catalog as an ...

Purdue RxA

Search This Blog