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.

Design failure: mean and tricky jug

Not only is this design inefficient, wasting most of the jug’s capacity; it is unhygienic – a remarkable achievement for a storage vessel made of glass. The teats are, ironically, bacteria traps because they are difficult to clean. It is a good example of an unnecessary fix. In any case the device would be more ‘playful’ (which really means ‘mean and tricky’ most of the time) and more functionally convergent if milk came from the teats and not a conventional spout.

Icons in GUI

I have doubts about the efficacy of icons. The icon is functionally both a switch and a label. Like most personal computer users, I use icons as on-switches. Click on an icon and you start a program or open a window.

So we treat our Windows and Apple desktops as control panels laid out with labelled switches. As a control panel filled with switches, the desktop of an Apple or Windows GUI is not well-designed. However, the format has spread to other devices with GUIs.

The visual effect of an array of icons can be pretty, particularly with brightly-coloured icons set against dark backgrounds, creating a jewel-box effect. But two factors make interpreting the data on the desktop inefficient: the small size of the icon and its uniform dimensions. The larger the desktop and the greater the number of icons on it, the more difficult it is to identify the correct switch for a desired function. Large numbers of distinctively coloured icons tend to dissolve into a field that looks randomly coloured, like a pointillist painting without a subject.













This desktop (my own) shows my attempt to group icons in distinctive patterns so as to help me find the switch I want to use. There is a little bit of functional convergence in my sorting of icons into groups of related programs and document types. But I find it to be an inadequate solution to the problem.

One alternative to icon-based controls is to follow the example of flight deck controls. A well-laid-out flight deck on an aircraft is a varied physical and visual landscape, which privileges important functions by making their control switches large, distinctively shaped and coloured, and centrally positioned relative to the operator. Even the dashboard of a car shows this coherence and natural fit in the design of its controls. I suppose a computer's steering wheel is its keyboard and mouse, and its video display is more often a window into an unfolding data landscape – like the sky for a plane or the highway for a car – than a control panel. But when the screen shows the desktop, it is a control panel. In GUIs of the moment, it functions poorly.

Coffee machines

The Atomic coffeemaker is a good example of conceptual design which uses exaggerated simplicity of line to create visual impact at the expense of a meaningful function. It is physically unable to make a good-quality cup of coffee due to its reliance on heating water to boiling temperature. The water is so hot by the time it passes through the ground coffee that it imparts a burnt taste to the results – every time.

The correct instrument to make coffee at home is an espresso machine which does not burn the coffee, since it uses motor-driven pressure to drive water of the correct temperature - about 90 degrees celsius – through the ground coffee. A rugged and well-designed example of an espresso machine for home use is the Rancilio Silvia, shown below.

Espresso machines with this form factor show the benefits of functional convergence. This is the opposite of designs that try to do two different things at once. The cups that fit on the recessed tray forming the top of the unit will be warmed by heat rising from the heating element. The cups have everything to do with making coffee and so does their being heated before use. There is a natural fit between the physical fact that heat rises and the placement of a recessed area for cups on the top of the unit rather than, say, on a shelf underneath it.

Design failure: coffee table chimaera

This low table tries to do two things at once with results both visually striking and functionally unsatisfactory.

The hi-fi components are at shin-barking level; their displays will be difficult to read at this height and their projecting controls will be kicked off easily by a careless passer-by or while vacuum-cleaning the floor. Because the object gives confusing cues about its purpose, the table does not encourage use as a table, ie, a surface on which books, crockery or other heavy items can be dumped carelessly, because we associate electronic equipment with preciousness and breakability.

The design doesn’t appear to allow ventilation to heat-sensitive amplifiers, which are likely to cook in their well-insulated solid wooden case. To make any sound with this product it will be necessary to attach speakers to it by cables, which will snag and trip people when the hi-fi-coffee-table is placed where a table of this height is normally placed: in the centre of the room.

Design failure: chess board

A strikingly poor example of chess set design. Where do you start? My eye first went to the pawns, which do not have a uniform shape. Although the heavy pieces’ heights are varied according to their value, the designer’s obsession with an interesting ‘roofline’ makes the status of each piece ambiguous at first glance in a game which prizes presence of mind and abhors distraction.

The board’s black and white squares are of insufficient contrast, and the map details, which include lettering and coloured lines, distract not only visually but conceptually from the game.

Finally, the chosen colours, though at least in contrast with one another, are ugly and their impact is interrupted by the use of black on the front and rear sides of the pieces.

Design failure: chimerical object

This chimerical object gives ambiguous cues as to its purpose. It also tries to do two different things at the same time and fails at both. Its simplicity of line is a waste of space.

As a chair, this product will be uncomfortable both to sit in while engaged in the task of reading, and to lounge in. There is some sensory feedback in the material but it is of the wrong type – much too rigid and hard. As a book shelf, the object has too little capacity to be useful and wastes the space under the top shelf because of the designer's obsession with curved plywood forms.

Imagine being a small child who has used outdoor play equipment. Will you see this object as an item for play, eg a slippery slide, or as a chair in which to read books? Even as a slippery slide, the object will give an unsatisfactory performance.

Design failure: user-hostile bus shelter

A bus shelter that is full of design faults. It is an example of mean and tricky design. It could also be called a conceptual design, which means the object has been designed according to notions of the designer rather than according to the traveller’s needs in reality.

This shelter is used in a climate of hot, humid summers and cold windy winters. The glass roof removes any possibility of shade at the hottest time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. The roof is not wide enough to protect passengers from rain as they board a bus. The perforated metal seating elements are not comfortably wide enough for two people. The open glass partitions allow cold air to blow over them on people’s heads and beneath them against people’s legs in winter. The colour of the enamelled steel parts is cold and depressing.

Design failure: chimerical radio pen

This is a chimaera: an object that tries to be two or more different things at the same time, all of them poorly and contradictorily. The radio speaker is too small to produce sound of any quality and its weight interferes with the natural motions of writing. The pen is made of a cheap material that gives no sensory feedback. A headphone socket is provided so that the constant jerking and tweaking of the headphone cable as you write conveys microphonic noise to your ears along with any sound you are trying to hear.

Imagine being a student who is bored with writing but likes the novelty of the radio. You will quickly be distracted from writing anything and obsessed with obtaining sound from any pen movements.

Design failure: floor lamp

These lamps do not project enough light to be useful in a room of average size. They are inherently structurally unstable and will fall over in use.

Imagine vacuum-cleaning around the lamps when they are installed as shown in the bottom-left picture in the series.

Design failure: chimerical bench desk

A failure because it tries to be two different things at the same time. Neither function works very well, and it is unlikely ever to be used for its intended purposes.

There is nowhere to use a mouse or to put a cup of coffee. The exaggerated simplicity of the line and splayed feet waste space and materials.

I am a critic largely against 'design'.

In this blog you can read about my mostly negative opinions of contemporary product and architectural 'design'. Sometimes I will write about well-designed objects and buildings.

There are a number of blogs that keep track of new releases of furniture, gadgets and architect-designed buildings; my blog's images come from these kinds of online collections.

This blog might have been called 'poorly designed objects', except that the items that I criticise here are anthologised mostly because they are seen as attractive or good design by others. So this blog should be read as a response to the implicitly positive evaluations of these designed objects by other bloggers.