Are designers working for the common good?

I have already complained about the effects of bad design. My unsent letter to Peugeot is a testament to the results of poor design. Interestingly enough, it is another encounter with my next-door neighbour which has prompted me to write about design again.

I really enjoyed reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. This book makes you take a step back and consider the underlying design of the objects we try and use in everyday life. The irony seems to be that the efforts of a hard-working designer are seldom noticed, where the work of half-witted fools is immediately apparent. As a techie, it is my responsibility to produce designs in the first category.

With a passion for electronic gadgets and with a nature that means I will lend a hand with other people's gadgets, I have had the misfortune to endure some pretty poor designs. My current personal bugbear is my Nokia 6210 mobile phone; having upgraded from a similar model, I should find this phone easy to use but it's a pain. Most of the changes I find difficult to come to terms with seem to be for change's sake.

Perhaps this is the main problem. Designers are frequently required to pack more features in, often unrelated to each other. They are required to make changes to the look and usage of the latest device, so that it looks different enough to get people to upgrade.

Sometimes designers incorrectly assume that people will read every page of the manual, and so place some of the coolest features in the most unlikely to be discovered of places: apparently, if you hold down the right-hand function button on the Nokia 6210, it goes into its voice-dialling mode and will dial a number you have previously assigned a voice-tag to, from the left-hand button when that number was on screen... of course!

I have yet to mention the plight of my neighbour and his video...

27 April 2001
Ashley Frieze