DESIGN: THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

My father, Sam Raymond, came up with the idea for the cartoon above many years ago. Like Harvey Pekar of American Splendor, Sam has lots of ideas for cartoons, but lacks the drawing skills to put them on paper. He frequently tells people his cartoon ideas, apologizing for the fact that he has to describe them. It was this habit of his that inspired me to draw my first cartoon for this weblog, and now look at me: I have become addicted to cartooning!

When I described Sam’s idea for the “go fishin’” cartoon to my friend Jennifer, she giggled and said, “Engineer humor.” True, indeed. Sam is an MIT-trained engineer, just like Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, which I read for my book report this week. Like Norman, Sam has strong feelings about good and bad design in everything from garlic presses to deep-sea camera housings. He has designed many of the latter for oceanographers and filmmakers including James Cameron, but he exhibits no less passion when talking about the engineering of humble, everyday objects like the former.

My father and Donald Norman have a lot in common. I laughed out loud when I read Norman’s story about his elaborate modifications of the light switches in his laboratory to achieve more “natural mapping” between the controls and the lights – in other words to help him figure out what switches controlled what lights. This is exactly the kind of thing Sam does all the time: adding screws, clamps, guards, extra holes and so on to all sorts of manufactured items that come his way in order to make them better suit his purposes.

In some families on Christmas morning, parents have to stop their children from playing with their presents right away. In my family, the children try in vain to stop our father from not only playing with his presents – and our presents - but also taking them apart, reassembling them and grabbing tools to start improving them.

One primary edict of Norman’s with which Sam would agree whole-heartedly is “Make controls visible.” Devices with invisible controls or tiny, low-contrast labels drive Sam nuts. He battles them with Sharpie pens, Scotch tape, brightly colored paper and paint. He has no compunction about taking a sleek, shiny, expensive new stereo component or computer device and immediately plastering it with hand-drawn arrows and big lettering to clarify how it should be used. To him, devices are things to be used, not status symbols or art objects, so no modification that could make something easier to use is out of bounds.

I have never learned to modify things with such ease. I like things to be pristine and cannot even bring myself to make a mark in a book. By contrast, the first thing Sam does when he buys a new book is pull out a pen and start underlining. His kids laugh at him a little because he will often underline the title, the author’s name and everything else on the cover page. It seems to us that when you underline everything, you defeat the purpose of underlining.

I finally broke down and “did a Sam” the other day with the remote controller to my DVD player. As on most remote controllers these days, the important buttons are jumbled in with a lot of other buttons I never use, so I constantly hit wrong buttons, which often leads to chaos. While watching a subtitled German film one evening I accidentally turned off the subtitles and couldn’t figure out how to turn them back on. Since I don’t understand German, I had to quit watching the movie. The next morning I bit the bullet, pulled out a Sharpie pen and drew big black marks around each of the four remote control buttons that matter to me. Then I tossed the controller aside with disgust. Now it is ugly, but I can see what I am doing in a dim room. I have joined “Sam’s Club.”

As an engineer who knows how to design things that work, Sam often wonders why, why, why there are so many badly designed things in the world. Norman has several interesting theories on this. One that I found especially illuminating has to do with the difference between design in the pre-industrial and the industrial world. In the old days, Norman explains, when things were made by individual craftspeople, it was relatively easy to modify designs because things were made one by one. This led to a slow, natural, Darwinian evolution in design.

In the industrial world, by contrast, things are manufactured in tremendous volume in elaborate processes that require costly templates and specialized machinery. This makes modifications more difficult and costly. In addition, designers are now distanced from users. In the old days, the blacksmith chatted with his customers in the forge, but today engineers and designers are separated from the end-users of their products by many layers of corporate bureaucracy. In many companies, designers are actually forbidden to communicate with users because of patent issues or the general culture of secrecy that pervades today’s corporate world. Another factor is the pressure of the capitalist market on manufacturers to constantly come up with something new and different to set their products apart from the competition.

The end result of this is that products seldom evolve gradually any more. When companies decide to modify a product, they usually introduce a whole new model with all kinds of new features added and often with good, old features removed. Norman discusses the paradox of products that evolve to the point of perfection and then go past that point and return to imperfection. If someone comes along and designs a perfect device, Norman writes, it is incumbent upon someone else to come along and design a competing device that will be different, and therefore less perfect.

I have a fantasy about some day giving my father a Christmas present that he would find so well conceived, engineered and executed that he would feel no need to modify it, only to admire it, using the word he reserves for the best kind of design: elegant. He would probably pick it up, look at the name of the manufacturer on its side, grab a Sharpie and underline it!