Analysis of design in a modern cruiseliner

Shown above is the modern cruiseliner The Independence of the Seas, an object of nearly inconceivable complexity whose design incorporates state-of-the-art engineering and whose main purpose is to provide pleasure to its passengers. This presumably includes aesthetic pleasure. It is interesting to consider whether a modern cruiseliner – the result of thousands of individual designers’, builders’ and engineers’ cooperative labours – could have design integrity.

A working definition of design integrity is:

• A coherent colour scheme
• Functional convergence
• Explicit structure.

The exterior of the craft uses familiar cues from the science of aerodynamics to suggest – for no clear reason in what is functionally a transportable block of apartments with a maximum velocity of 22 knots – an impression of extreme speed. The uniformity of colour adds to an impression of a vehicle designed as a single unit for high-speed, futuristic travel.

In the atrium-like space shown below, called the ‘Royal Promenade’, the sense of unity gained from the ship’s exterior disappears. Façadism reigns over a mall-like ambience confected from candy-coloured lighting; vague references to 19th-century market streets; and imitation shopfronts that incorporate false wood finishes, functionally useless and culturally alienated striped awnings and neon signage.





























I would direct the student of design seeking examples of design integrity on a cruiseliner to look at the engine room.

Design failure: hostile furniture

The blog writer who refers to this table and chair describes the item as follows: ‘Great chair design by Sebastien Wierinck Studio. One of the unique qualities of CNC cutting is its amazing accuracy which means the connections in the chair will fit perfectly.’ Your hips, buttocks and lower back, however, will not.

In his obsession with complex engineering and precision-cut parts the designer has forgotten that a chair with a triangular base is inherently unstable. The back of the chair is not adjustable and provides inadequate lumbar support. The materials are too hard for sitting on for extended periods. The serrations in the CNC-cut joints of this item are liable to catch at clothing and present depressingly hostile visual and tactile feedback.

That an item of furniture is collapsible or foldable is helpful to the user in only a small number of applications, eg, multi-purpose auditoriums and halls in which furniture must be set out in varying configurations and put away many times. Assuring collapsibility almost always introduces structural and usability compromises into the design.

Design failure: kitsch in the kitchen

The pleasing tactile feedback of the material chosen for these salt-and-pepper shakers cannot rescue this item from the design trash-heap of kitsch façadism.

A number of objections could be made to the details of this design. The curled edges of the item are liable to damage. The hemisphere that joins the two pieces will lose its grip as repeated use erodes the ‘cup’ into which it fits. But it is better to strike at the root of this poor application of conceptual design to a noble material. There is simply no need to fix the unbroken format of the salt-and-pepper shaker.

Even if we assume the conventional design needs fixing and that the correct fix is a salt-and-pepper shaker in the stylised form of a waxed moustache, the reference to a moustache is senseless unless there is some convergence in the choice of material. But if a prototype salt-and-pepper shaker was made from, say horse-hair or nylon fibre, the choice of façade might lead the designer to think ‘how perverse and fatuous this object is’, rather than ‘how clever and playful a designer I am’.















Not all façades are meaningless. But the kitsch façade belongs in the realm of conceptual art, not product design where real objects exert real effects on their users. It also may have some aesthetic value in literature, perhaps in order to dramatise the kind of human character we would rather avoid at parties or in the workplace.











Above: Object, Meret Oppenheim, 1936. The functionally useless application of fur to a teacup has no merit at all from a design point of view, but may be meaningful as a symbolic reference to the physical and psychological experience of cunnilingus.

Design failure: signage

The technology of graphic design today affords infinite possibilities for poor results. This design for signage in a large public building is confusing and wasteful.

The at-a-glance reading of my position is simultaneously 4, 1, 14 (or possibly one raised to the fourth power), and 8. Despite its being heavy-handedly foregrounded by the choice of a bold sans-serif typeface at an enormous size relative to the sign’s dimensions, this is meaningless data unless and until the reader notices the tiny labels ‘level’ (rotated 90 degrees away from a comfortable reading orientation) and ‘pier’. The map suggests that the pier is something like a block in a larger complex of buildings. The scales of numbers from one to eight and one to four are redundant. I would classify the conceit of a number scale in this context as a subtle kind of kitsch façadism. A printed sign is nothing like an indicator in an old-fashioned elevator as it is static and an elevator's real position is variable. It is foolish to pretend that a static sign is a dynamic electronic display – and fatuous to borrow the conventions of antique, incandescent displays in an era when two-digit digital displays are the norm in elevators.

The presence of a large numeral 8 on the wooden column in this photograph remains unexplained by the sign.

There is not an uncomfortable chair in the east sunroom, as this sign suggests; the device next to the label ‘east sunroom’ is apparently meant to point downstairs. But its exaggerated simplicity of line simply makes it illegible. An arrowhead is legible in any orientation as it should be, because its purpose is to point equally well in any direction. Arrowheads are not broken and should not be fixed.

To wrap a sign giving directions around a 90-degree, outwards-facing corner is to interrupt the reader’s attempt to get an at-a-glance view of his or her position. When the reader attempts to get an at-a-glance view, the result will be exaggerated foreshortening of both text and images on the sign, and decreased legibility.
















Above: Flawless signage at an international airport demonstrating the correct design of arrowheads.














Above: An elevator display from the present day using LED or CRT display technology. Signage driven by software is suitable for dynamic displays of information. The decorative frame around the large, clear numerals is redundant but perhaps informative culturally.
















Above: An antique incandescent elevator display in its correct context: an elevator manufactured in the 1970s. Electronic circuits control incandescent lights that illuminate plastic rings surrounding the buttons. Of design interest are its non-intuitive sequence and button layout, and the post-hoc modifications made for vision-impaired users.

Design failure: the e-reader

This utterly unnecessary fix has an impressive list of features.

• ‘Paper-like’ magnetized ink display: almost like paper!
• Digital Rights Curtailment. You buy it; we keep it.
• Limited range of titles. Available material subject to the manufacturer’s commercial interests and marketplace demand.
• Poor user interface lacking basic file organisation tools.
• Small display of invariant proportions.
• Unable to display colour images.
• Half or less than half the dot resolution of commercially printed paper.
• Displays 16 levels of grey, the square-root of the greys available on this video display screen.
• Allows days of continuous reading time. After device is recharged for 4 hours, you’re back in business for days more reading.
• Relies on state-of-the-art wireless communications network to function.
• Unavailable where electricity supply unavailable.
• Available intermittently where electricity supply intermittent.
• Lifetime expires as soon as 3G wireless connectivity protocols and hardware become obsolete.
• CAUTION: Fragile. Do not drop, flex, expose to moisture, extreme heat or cold, or place under heavy items. No user serviceable parts inside. Battery non-disposable and costs the same as a soft-cover novel.
• Cost: only ten times the price of a large hardback novel.
• Contents not included in purchase price.

Design failure: mobile phone

Poor user interfaces, both physical and virtual, are part of the package in this modish cellphone.

The physical interface has a number of flaws which flow from both mean-and-tricky and oversimplifying design mentalities.

The device conceals both its power button and its three main menu navigation buttons, then ensures the buttons are physically unpleasant to use. The image below shows the navigation and power buttons on the product. Imagine unpacking this product with the intention to use it as quickly as possible. You have charged the battery and inserted a SIM. You must find the power button. The usual visual cues are red colour and one of the standard international symbols for ‘on’ and ‘off’. In this keypad layout colour has been removed and the power symbol reduced in size to something a little smaller than the letter ‘o’ in this sentence. When you locate the button despite it or its label not being coloured in red but in low-contrast grey on silver, imagine pressing it and experiencing the almost imperceptible travel, lack of physical feedback from distinct edges and tiny size built into the button’s physical design. The central navigation button and alphanumeric keys share these poor tactile qualities.












Though they have been stripped of their expected green and red colour cues, the ‘call’ and ‘hang up’ icons suggest clearly enough what functions the buttons on which they have been printed carry out. Even so, the indistinctly demarcated, flat, open spaces where a simple closed shape raised from its surrounds should be, do not suggest that the handset icon is anything more than a decoration.

The user is expected to know that the unlabelled outer ring of the navigation button conceals a tilting mechanism that has four ‘clickable’ directions. Application menus are accessed with two other well-disguised physical buttons: these are not button-shaped, have none of the coloured trim that appears around all the other keys, have almost invisible backlighting and no printed labels at all, but they do have onscreen labels, ‘Options’ and ‘Back’, as shown in the picture below. This labelling invites confusion in the mind of the user with the functions of the tilting navigation button, which has ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ directions.




















Note: red arrows not included with phone.

The software interface of this cellphone is a messy mixture of Windows-like file tree metaphor and Web-like hyperlink metaphor. It presents users with non-conventional cues and requires secret knowledge for the use of everyday functions.

Those who read left-to-right and who are familiar with desktop computer GUIs, expect ‘options’ to be on the right-hand side of most menu bars and the ‘back’ navigational arrow on the left, ie, back to where they started reading and/or looking. Click on the Tools menu in the Firefox Web browser to see an example of this convention.

Applications are accessed by using directional presses of the tilting navigation button and pressing icons. To select from application menus requires secret knowledge of the two silver keys and the non-conventional arrangement of their functions discussed above. To send an SMS, the next most likely thing the average user wants to do with a cellphone, you must navigate to a text message module in the cellphone’s software interface. It is there that the user will discover that ‘predictive’ text mode is on by default, and when engaged it uncontrollably and incorrectly predicts the word you are attempting to type on the keypad, by forming the incorrect word before it has been typed. This function is not switchable unless you know its secret button.

The cellphone’s user guide is supplied on a single fold-out paper sheet, which presents large quantities of small print and greyscale images in a 21-cell grid of 100 x 75 mm ‘pages’ – making each page about the size of a playing card. The instructions for turning ‘predictive’ texting on or off appear in the layout below the following picture.











The user guide has been designed with good layout rules in mind and it follows plain-English technical writing conventions, but its effectiveness is defeated by its having been forced into a physical layout that more resembles a magazine flat plan than a finished document.

The development of ‘predictive’ text software is a quick and dirty fix for the inherent design limitations of a telephone dialpad. A dialpad is not by nature broken and does not need a fix unless it is forced to become a device for typing text. The best design solution for a device that is designed to send text messages as well as receive and process numeric input is shown below.

Design failure: chess board

Here is another unnecessary fix of a design with a high degree of functional and aesthetic integrity. Why the designer of this chess set thought the hierarchy of chess pieces, which is fundamental to any chess player’s understanding of the game, should be unnecessarily emphasised by setting each type of piece on a different physical level is unclear to me, unless it was in order to be interesting for about one minute. Not even the classificatory scheme makes sense, as pawns, which are of a value equal to one another, here appear on a different level each.

This chessboard would be supremely awkward to use as the setting for an actual game of chess. Imagine, for example, the difficulty of visualising a bishop’s move of more than one square.

Design virtues: evident structure in a lawnmower

A petrol-engine lawnmower is an ungainly machine which probably needs a complete design rethink. However it is a good example of design that completely refuses façadism. It hides nothing beneath panels or fairings except, for functional and safety reasons, the rotating cutting blades.

Design failure: mean and tricky bed base

The shin-barking bed base has become fashionable – a poor design which in many of its variants lacks even space for storage underneath its exaggeratedly bulky, physically dangerous frame.

Kitsch façadism defined

Kitsch façadism forces an object into a form that has no relation to its use. In the making of this object good ergonomics was the last thing on the designer’s mind.

Designed hyperspace in a mobile phone

Designed hyperspace can be illustrated as shown in the above picture. The blue line represents the plan view of a plastic panel for a small electronic item such as a mobile phone. The red line represents the plan view of the device’s internal electronic components such as printed circuit boards. The space between the red line and the blue line is called ‘designed hyperspace’ because it has no purpose except to deliver the promises of marketing hype surrounding the product. It is also space that, though real and physical, has no place in the product user’s understanding of the product and its uses.

The images below show some of the insides of a Palm Pre, a product which uses façadism to suggest that its shape is ‘organic’. Only designed hyperspace makes it so, although the shapes of its real components are interesting in themselves. I doubt this sort of façadism serves any ergonomic purpose: a packet of cigarettes is as satisfying to hold as an organically shaped piece of moulded plastic, and its paper-based materials are arguably more pleasing to touch.

Design failure: obsession produces a chimaera

The problems here are familiar ones. The item is a chimaera which does three things poorly. The suggested use of the end-pieces of the form as a magazine holder is optimistic. The acute angle of the V-shaped section will cause more than one or two magazines to jam together, interfere with each others’ removal and to flip out onto the floor. The designer’s obsession with bentwood forms wastes storage space and the shelf is too low, positioning books at ankle height. Finally, the seat is too hard and without lumbar support.

Design virtues: an architectural solution by Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Ingels has explained his reasons for the design for an apartment block shown in the bottom picture. This is excellent architectural design. Despite the building’s unconventional appearance it is non-conceptual. The design shows a high degree of functional convergence and its form cleverly integrates the needs of the building’s users with the surrounding urban environment. The relevant part of the video is about 11 minutes after the start.

Design failure: user-hostile remote control

Marantz has produced a poorly-designed remote control that must be one of the leaders in a crowded field. It has an ON button, an OFF button, and an ON-OFF button. The pictures show the unprecedented duplication of universal symbols and basic functions; the tiny, identically-coloured switches for different functions; and the crowded, busy layout; but they cannot convey the unpleasant physical feedback of small, rubbery switches which wobble when pressed.

This item is full of peculiarities that do not distinguish it from many other poorly-designed remote controls, but the three power buttons are notably bad design. For the simple purpose of switching components on or off, or switching between them, it is a fiendish combination of the non-intuitive and the tricky.

The device controls a Marantz Digital Sound Processor for a home entertainment system. That it makes the most basic operations complex is enough to show its failure as a design. Imagine that the DSP is switched off. You wish to watch satellite or cable television. To switch on the DSP, press [AMP] twice: not once, as reason and intuition expect, but twice in succession rapid enough for the remote control to recognise what you are asking of it. Then press [ON], avoiding the larger and more tempting [ON/OFF - SOURCE] button. Press [DSS] not once, but twice. You may now watch The Simpsons.

Design failure: nasty tactile feedback in a hand dryer

My first encounter with the Dyson Airblade, a new design for a public hand dryer, was at Central station in my home city. The designer is well-known for his brilliant design for a vacuum cleaner (still too expensive for me to want to experience its brilliance personally) and his obsession with high-speed cyclonic air currents informs the design of the Airblade.

My objections to the design are that (1) its interface is physically unpleasant and unhygienic; (2) it is extremely noisy. The illustrations in this article and on the page linked above show that to use this device you must put your hands inside a cavity through two narrow apertures. I don’t know how long the Airblade at Central Station had been installed, but it was covered already in dried, sticky streaks of dirty water that had been blown off patrons’ hands. In use it is permanently wet, cold and greasy to touch. And it is difficult to use the device without touching the surface of the manacle-like portals or the restricted interior volume. One of the ergonomic problems associated with the use of extremely fast-moving, pressurised air is the extremely loud noise it makes, loud enough to damage human beings‘ hearing and never better than irritating to hear in a public space. The Airblade is as loud as you could expect ‘unheated air travelling at over 640 km/h’ to be. For the reasons given above, it is the last place I would wish to put my hands. The whole thing is as inviting of physical interaction as a meat grinder.

Design virtues: the monocoque in wheeled vehicles

Graders appeal to me because of the integrity of their design. First, their chassis is also their body, an impressive convergence in function that few but the most expensive road cars can achieve. Second, they are designed to do one job well, and the form factor completely supports the purpose of the vehicle. Third, I would expect that, ergonomically, a grader scores highly: for the simplicity and physical feedback of its hydraulic controls and for the high visibility afforded by a cabin which is set high off the ground and is mostly window. The driver even has a view downward past his own feet so that he can visually check the operation of the grading blade. Stability is assured by the wide, low stance and the heavy, rugged materials.

I thought more about the cleverness and efficiency of building a monocoque, combination chassis/body for a wheeled vehicle out of what is, effectively, a bent I-beam, with minimal body panelling and no wheel-arches. I then realised that automotive designers have used this highly efficient layout for purposes widely divergent from road construction.

The swept-wing motif

1. Draw a golden rectangle ABCD. Bisect it with a line EF.
2. Draw two squares EGPD and IBFJ in the golden rectange.
3. Draw a smaller golden rectangle KFCM to enclose part of the lower half of ABCD.
4. Draw a circle with centre O (at the intersection of diagonals IF and BJ) so that it touches all four corners of IBFJ.
5. Draw a larger circle with centre J of radius JG.
6. Construct an irregular polygon by joining points E, L, N, P.

This odd shape is interesting because of its frequent use in contemporary car design, although it is likely to have first arisen in aeronautical engineering due to its ability to help wings generate lift without excessive drag. I don’t know if it has a widely used name so I call it a swept-wing motif. Its dynamism causes it to appeal to designers of objects that are engineered to move quickly or to look as if they might. Here are some swept-wing motifs in everyday objects – none of them related functionally to aircraft.

The unresolvable design problem of the automobile

A lounge suite on a wheeled, motorised platform should be no-one’s idea of style or utility. Even in its state-of-the-art form, the automobile is an inherently awkward device whose operation entails massive inefficiencies of ergonomics and energy use. The sportier the model of lounge-suite-on-motorised-wheels, the more extreme and whimsical will be the inefficiencies of its design. The many safety features of modern private vehicles reflect the many dangers inherent in such an awkward concept.

Below are two realisations of an inherently awkward engineering and design concept. One of these drivers is more comfortable, better entertained, and runs a safer, cheaper and more fuel-efficient vehicle than the other. Hence his bigger smile.



























All cars are dangerous, waste fuel and money, pollute the planet and rely on ‘the narcissism of small differences’ for their appeal. If you must drive a car, look for a car with the least-worst styling, safety engineering and energy use. There is plenty of information on these topics for car consumers. I am interested in the good and bad of body styling.

Car manufacturing and marketing today are globalised. ‘Platforms’, or chassis designs, are shared not just among different models, but among different makes owned by the same multinational manufacturer. In some ways this has improved the cosmetic appearance of contemporary cars.









The Ford Mondeo is a good example of the convergence of attractive body designs in car makes that were formerly ugly and/or nondescript. Its high, straight waistline, pronounced wheel-arches with an angular cross-section, concealed B-pillars, large alloy wheels and oversized, bull-nosed face and grill have little originality; but due to the pedigree of the borrowed design elements, the ensemble has considerable visual appeal. Thanks to Peugeot for tail-light design, Audi for the face and grille, and Chevrolet for the lowered ‘greenhouse’ or glass area relative to the high-waisted body.

The fact that cars rely on the narcissism of small differences for their appeal imposes an ‘upgrade treadmill’ on either the manufacturers, or the market, depending on your own interests and perspective in the global economy. It is unusual for the average consumer to run their car until it is unrepairable, which for most vehicles today would mean driving them more than 350,000 km or achieving its equivalent in wear-and-tear. There are several recent cases of manufacturers fixing unbroken designs – resulting in unattractive modifications to the body design of models that were already popular and good-looking. Below is a visual comparison of two editions of the Mazda 6 sedan.

The top picture is the older. True to the tendency for convergence in design features in the globalised car industry, all of the design ‘DNA’ noted above in the Ford Mondeo is present in the older Mazda 6. There is little to complain about except the awkwardness at the base of the C-pillar where the line of the pillar has been complicated by a little plastic section holding a presumably fixed piece of rear-door glass. The newer model is an unappealing welding of Chris Bangle’s notorious BMW 7-series at the rear and a Toyota Camry at the front. The acutely angled front and rear light enclosure detail is a wearisome bit of trickery that has long ceased to suggest sportiness, if it ever did. I also find distracting the protuberance of a square boot profile from the Porsche-like curved line that implicitly joins the C-pillar to the rear bumper. Exaggeratedly square-sectioned front wheel-arches look as bad in the new Mazda 6 as they do in the slabby Toyota Camry from which they have been borrowed. Finally, a high waist, however straight, is unsatisfactory if it brings with it a big arse – as it does here.

Keys as designed objects

This design for a door key rises above mere modishness because it solves a practical problem.

I cannot think of a time when I did not wish to use a key quickly. The lock is a necessary inconvenience in modern life and it is by nature an obstruction to a place I need to go or to something I need to get. To pick the right key from the conventional keys pictured I need to identify an object hidden among a number of very similar objects. Keycutters now sell aluminium keys with coloured coatings, which are useful until it is dark. Coloured rubber rings around the bow of the key provide some meaningful tactile feedback until I have two or more of them on my keyring and it is dark.


The design shown in the first picture has a distinctly shaped bow which provides both visual and tactile feedback to enable the user to pick the correct key from a ring full of keys quickly. The blade can be cut with conventional tools to fit conventional locks. A good melding of creative forms and practical applications with a result that is more effective than the conventional.

Mean and tricky design

Mean and tricky design is conceptual by nature and often obsessive as well. The designer’s obsession may be for complex engineered parts, or pointy things, or exaggerated simplicity. What distinguishes a mean and tricky object like this table is the potential for injury during use of the object and/or the discomfort and impracticality involved in everyday use of the object.

Users of this table, after admiring its complex engineering, can expect to bark their shins and knees on its sharp, aggressive angles and be depressed by its dark colour and general hostility to its use as a table. Chairs cannot be drawn any closer than the asymmetrical, sloping feet of the table allow, resulting in a seating position that is awkwardly far from the glass surface.

Design failure: kitsch notes

This item is kitsch façadism: it grabs attention by a superficial reference to something that has neither a functional nor a material relationship to the object itself. As a consequence of this, the item has obvious functional shortcomings. The photographic image on the paper interferes with the legibility of notes written in any colour ink due to reduced contrast. The irregular shape is expensive to die-cut and its negative spaces would be better used as writing space.

There is also something conceptually wrong with the design. My hand is the last place I wish to write a note. I'm using it because there is nothing better available. Why would I transfer the aspects of hands that are useless for writing – low-contrast, coloured surface, irregular shape – to an object that actually was good for writing notes on? That a hand is a funny old place to write notes even if it really is made of paper is interesting for one minute.

If you must insist on façadism in your design, make it convergent with the meaning of the object. The stack of adhesive notepaper below reminds the user about the relationship between paper as a finished product and its raw materials, perhaps encouraging moderation in its consumption. However, the woodgrain-printed surfaces still interfere with the legibility of written notes.