Chapomatic

August 31, 2006

Why Designers Drive Me Nuts, In A Nutshell

Filed under: — Chap @ 7:23 pm

See this picture? Kinda dramatic and interesting, right?

RiverGlowGOODBAD.jpg
Metropolis magazine highlighted this design project as a runner-up design winner in their magazine. Apparently the designers figured out a way to harvest some energy in a waterway, then samples for impurities and then glows green or red depending on the “pollution level”.It’s almost a good idea. Except for something that anybody who spends time on the water knows–red and green lights are already telling people something on the water–and it’s a lot more immediately important than what the designers want. Lights and sound signals and shapes in the water indicate where safe water is, and what the other vessels are and what they might be doing. You know, that’s something one could find out by asking someone using the waterway if putting random red and green lights on the road is a good idea. I would bet there’s not too many people in RISD or the editorial staff of Metropolis who have had to field day a boat, compared to the nearest marina.

So here we have a Great Idea–executed in a manner that will cause people to die if implemented. Great work, designers.You can look at the above picture, with a blurb, at this link–which resizes your browser, and then assumes you want a slideshow at a particular speed so that if you flip to another window, or spend too much time actually reading the type you get inconveniently redirected to that resized window again with a different Great Idea.

You can also look at the project at this link–which is a group of photos (even the text is in a photo) that forces you to click through in the order the designer put together.

Sometimes I wish for a designer who spent more time thinking about the humans using the thing and how to mitigate the Law of Unintended Consequences than thinking about how pretty the thing is, or the importance of deconstructed modernism to the message their design will communicate. There are a lot of unhappy people having to live in bad Le Courbusier knockoffs…

One Response to “Why Designers Drive Me Nuts, In A Nutshell”

  1. triticale Says:

    I spent part of a summer on Mississippi River towboats. My first thought, on viewing the image was that it was a lousy way of marking the channel. I’m fairly certain that there are regulations in place which would protect river workers from the implimentation of this idiocy, and that the designers would bitch about how the Army Corps of Engineers just doesn’t Understand.

    The designers do think about people who use thinks; they just think themselves wiser than them all.

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