Despite surrounding us in every object that we own, encounter, and interact with, design is oftentimes an invisible sort of force. Good design generally directs the user without being overtly noticeable, which means that it is often easier for us to pick out elements of bad design—that is, we most often notice design when we’re frustrated or confused by it. However, when we feel these emotions, it is important to understand which aspect of a design has caused them. Sometimes the failure in design is not caused by the most obvious component; indeed, the design of a specific frustrating component may have been the best design available if there are external and unmalleable constraints that it had to work within. Noting which level a design fails at, then, will make addressing design concerns much more exact and relevant, as critiquing a specific frustration without addressing the wider problematic system brings about no progress.
While perhaps not the most exciting topic, a strong example of this sort of multilayered design failure would be my apartment’s kitchen cabinets. For reference, my apartment is a small single-bedroom unit where space is generally limited, and this statement is especially true when it comes to storage. When first moving into my apartment, I expected to put a tray that held all my silverware in a drawer where I could access it easily by sliding the cabinet open—to me, this was a standard, and it had been the case at my previous apartment as well. However, I quickly found that there was no drawer suitable for this in the entire apartment: There was only one drawer in the whole kitchen that slid out, and it was not wide enough for the tray to fit.
Originally, I found this to be a frustrating and confusing design choice for the cabinets. But in retrospect, the fault really isn’t with the cabinets themselves: Most of the kitchen space that hasn’t already been filled with appliances is dedicated to storage, and none of this storage is purposefully broken into unnecessarily small sections. Instead, the problem here is the size of the kitchen: If the sliding shelf was expanded horizontally, it would intersect with the oven or the rotating cabinet in the room’s corner. Perhaps the kitchen could be expanded to solve the issue, but this brings up questions about how to rearrange the carpet in the place that acts as the apartment’s main hallway. Perhaps the true solution to the design problem is to expand the unit altogether, but then this brings up economic problems, both for the builders and the renters. It thus becomes very difficult to find where the true design problem lies, and it is also difficult to see how to fix it.
This is all not to say that there cannot be design issues with specific components. For instance, the bathroom cabinets in my same apartment include two small hand-width sliding drawers flanking a much larger drawer. Again, when I first moved into my apartment, I discovered a design frustration with these cabinets: the largest “drawer” would not open, as it was only a decoration. This meant that all bathroom objects needed to be stored in the much smaller drawers, which once again first seemed confusing and unnecessary to me. However, upon further examination, this design choice also occurred because of some constraint: The sink is situated directly behind the large drawer, so there is no room to fit any storage. And yet there is still a problem with the design of the bathroom drawers as a component, in that the middle “drawer” looks like a drawer in the first place and therefore deceives the user into thinking that it can be used. Simply replacing this drawer with a decorative piece of wood would have solved this problem—thus, this problem mostly comes down to a component design issue, rather than a system one.
While perhaps not the most exciting topic, a strong example of this sort of multilayered design failure would be my apartment’s kitchen cabinets. For reference, my apartment is a small single-bedroom unit where space is generally limited, and this statement is especially true when it comes to storage. When first moving into my apartment, I expected to put a tray that held all my silverware in a drawer where I could access it easily by sliding the cabinet open—to me, this was a standard, and it had been the case at my previous apartment as well. However, I quickly found that there was no drawer suitable for this in the entire apartment: There was only one drawer in the whole kitchen that slid out, and it was not wide enough for the tray to fit.
Originally, I found this to be a frustrating and confusing design choice for the cabinets. But in retrospect, the fault really isn’t with the cabinets themselves: Most of the kitchen space that hasn’t already been filled with appliances is dedicated to storage, and none of this storage is purposefully broken into unnecessarily small sections. Instead, the problem here is the size of the kitchen: If the sliding shelf was expanded horizontally, it would intersect with the oven or the rotating cabinet in the room’s corner. Perhaps the kitchen could be expanded to solve the issue, but this brings up questions about how to rearrange the carpet in the place that acts as the apartment’s main hallway. Perhaps the true solution to the design problem is to expand the unit altogether, but then this brings up economic problems, both for the builders and the renters. It thus becomes very difficult to find where the true design problem lies, and it is also difficult to see how to fix it.
This is all not to say that there cannot be design issues with specific components. For instance, the bathroom cabinets in my same apartment include two small hand-width sliding drawers flanking a much larger drawer. Again, when I first moved into my apartment, I discovered a design frustration with these cabinets: the largest “drawer” would not open, as it was only a decoration. This meant that all bathroom objects needed to be stored in the much smaller drawers, which once again first seemed confusing and unnecessary to me. However, upon further examination, this design choice also occurred because of some constraint: The sink is situated directly behind the large drawer, so there is no room to fit any storage. And yet there is still a problem with the design of the bathroom drawers as a component, in that the middle “drawer” looks like a drawer in the first place and therefore deceives the user into thinking that it can be used. Simply replacing this drawer with a decorative piece of wood would have solved this problem—thus, this problem mostly comes down to a component design issue, rather than a system one.
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