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.