Designing a system

Interesting Lecture by Roland Jones about design here the other day, especially for an incorrigible economist who knows basically nothing about it. Not “nothing at all” of course, after all I am a consumer and therefore appear on the receiving end of design. But what I mean by “knowing nothing” is rather that I know nothing about the underlying factors of it. Here is one clear example:

I remembered that Roland brought up a story about a project he was working on once. The government was rebuilding a park (I apologize for not remembering where) in order to get rid of the drunks and addicts. The park had for example to become more open and light, but they also had to thing about the outside furniture. Therefore Roland got the tasks to design the benches for this new established park. It sounds fairly easy, doesn’t it? The only catch was that the benches should be designed in a way so that it would be impossible to sleep on, either through placing two hand rests in the middle or just by making the benches incredibly uncomfortable to sleep on.

This was something I haven’t thought of before. I’ve been backpacking, sleeping on the airports and train stations many times before, cursing the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting rooms and hoping that one day the design of this chairs might improve so that people actually can sleep on them while waiting for their connection. What I did not think about was the fact that this uncomfortable chair was designed this way on purpose, similar to the benches in this mentioned park, designed in order to decrease the number of people spending the night there.

Neither did I think of the design in general as something that powerful until Roland mentioned it in his lecture. He was talking about design as “problem solving” and “Designing a system rather that designing a product” were his exact words.

This also made me to remember one of the lectures I had at SSE during my first year, “Firms and Markets”. The teacher was comparing McDonalds strategy to a simple production line, mentioning the fact that even the chairs at McDonalds were designed uncomfortable on purpose, to make people want to finish their meal as soon as possible, in order to free the space for new customers. Talking about “designing a system!”

And there are obviously plenty of examples like that where designers by their products indirectly make people to act in a certain way. The thing is that one has to “be awake” in order to be able to see these hidden meanings in the products. Usually it’s the simple “sell as many as possible”-design but sometimes it’s deeper than that. And now and then it gets really tricky. Here is a list of product that, at least I, had problems to see any meaning with the following products. Why would anyone want to buy a glass table on bicycle wheels, or a chair with pieces of wood sticking out of it, or a chair that looks like barrow, or a mirror where you can’t see your own reflection, or a clock where you can’t see the time, or a shelf where you can’t put anything, or a high tea cup, well I guess you get the point…

How can you talk about the hidden meaning here, when most of the products do not even fill their purpose?! My point is that some design might be very powerful, but some of the examples we see just seem to be striving after being as odd as possible, which occasionally eliminates the whole purpose of the product. And in that case I don’t see why people should buy these products at all, unless they actually want to have something that fills the purpose of “not filling any purpose”.