Living in a designed world

How unconscious design affects our daily life

Our constant interactions with the designed world often go unnoticed. We arrive at work or school safely in the morning because we followed the lines on the ground and stopped at the red lights. Often, there is an aspect of coercion to design that works to control human behavior.

Take doors, for example. There are some doors that require a sign to operate. On the other hand, there are some poorly placed doors that send you unconscious signals to do the opposite of what you need to do to open them. We’ve all done it: you push when you’re supposed to pull or you pull when you’re supposed to push. It’s not your fault, it’s the designer’s. These types of doors, often called Norman Doors after the designer and researcher Don Norman, produce the wrong usability signals. A handle should mean “pull” and a panel should mean “push,” but not with these doors. This is poor design, often done unintentionally.

But design can be coercive, too. How about a bench? We see them all the time, but do we realize that some have been intentionally designed to deter the homeless from sleeping on them? Arm rests dividing up benches make it uncomfortable or impossible for people to lie down. Here’s another example of a bench that might not even be considered a bench at all. It only allows people to stand against it resting for a short period of time. The most famous bench that was meticulously designed to prohibit 22 human behaviors is called the Camden Bench. If you look at the bench, you can see how the recesses near the ground allow people to protect their bags from potential theft. One thing you can’t see is that the bench is covered with a special coating to repel graffiti. The Camden Bench deters theft, drug dealing, littering, sleeping, and many more actions, while only allowing two things — sitting and sitting together.

While at first this sort of design makes sense from a particular point of view, this type of coercive design — often referred to as hostile or unpleasant design — is really controversial and considered by many to be discriminatory. These benches, for example, exert a social control in a public space for an unwanted demographic. We are making sitting on a bench more pleasant for some and unpleasant for others.

There is a lot of responsibility in design, and part of that responsibility is considering the social implications of what you are creating. Fortunately, the design industry has recently embraced socially-responsible design, with many fields opening up such as Human-Centered Design (HCD) and User-Experience Design (UX). The fields of HCD and UX focus on the needs and experiences of humans and how others are affected by these designs.

If you think about it, from the moment you woke up this morning, everything around you was designed in some way or another. Most of us probably woke up to the sound of our phone’s alarm clock, or used a spoon to eat cereal, or got to class on a bike. We all have things lying around our dorms or homes that we do not even think twice about how they were made. All of these objects were conceived, designed, and fabricated by someone. These things didn’t just happen on their own. Through processes of iteration and failure, these objects developed into everyday items that you probably never notice. And often, that was the goal of the designer all along. As Norman puts it, “good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”

Objects are designed based off of research and an understanding of human behavior, desires and needs. And these needs change over time, but that’s the purpose of design — to fulfill the needs of the user. As a designer you can direct and control the lives of others for good or for ill. Think about how your decisions are influenced by design and how your decisions will influence design in the world you will create in the future. It is our responsibility to create conscious design, and when doing so keep the term Humanity-Centered Design on your mind. We continue to do a much better job designing with the user in mind, but we also need to design for all humans. This sort of design should respect people’s health and happiness as well.

Design is incredibly powerful, and as you hopefully now realize, it often goes unnoticed. Every building you walk into, nearly everything you touch was created.

Consider that, appreciate that, and question that.

Story originally published in The Edge of Town. Photography by Sabrina Drescher.