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.