volume 4
if I were placed in the cockpit of a modern jet airliner, my inability to perform well would neither surprise nor bother me. But why should I have trouble with doors and light switches, water faucets and stover?
-- the design of everyday things, don norman
editorial
volume 4 - the design
of everyday things
Where do the things we use everyday come from? Why are they the way they are? And do they actually serve the purpose they were meant to fulfil? From the seemingly ordinary, like the humble potato peeler, to the complex, like our phones, computers and all the magical ones and zeroes that make the modern world turn, everything around us has been created, moulded, designed to fit a given set of necessities. But do they actually do what they were meant to do?
In his seminal work, from which the topic for this month’s volume has been borrowed, Don Norman dissects what good design actually means. There is absolutely no reason for doors to be confusing, and yet, they are. Some are pushed, others are opened. An oven is an oven is an oven. Even books, straightforward as they are, confound. Some are meant to be read, some are meant to be skipped, some are just meant to look pretty on a coffee table or a Pinterest mood board.
Adrian Frutiger on the other hand focuses on the humble topic of signage, in his work “Signs and Symbols - Their Design and Meaning”. How much meaning does a mark on a page have, a line, a triangle, a collection of these that makes up an letter or an image. It never ceases to amaze me how much meaning and weight something as simple as a dot on a page can have. It closes a sentence, it ends a thought, it marks the centre or a target, it can be an eye and it can be a celestial object a million light years away. Join them together and you get a line. Join more together and you form letters, trees, people, thoughts, ideologies, cultures.
Design is inspiring. It presents a set of problems to be solved, a way to make the maelstrom of experiences that is our lives more readable, more understandable, easier to navigate. We divide our pictures into thirds, so they are more balanced. We layout and write our texts in ways that make them easier to read, look at, and understand. We use colours that complement each other or use certain combinations that tend to evoke specific emotions. We seek to simplify the things we use everyday in order to make them more approachable, to enable more of us to use them.
And yet, there is something to be said for breaking all of these rules. Sometimes we go against all of our instincts and create something absurd, something so seemingly broken that it shouldn’t work. A book that is closed on both ends, an urinal that cannot be used, a digital block of text that falls apart whenever you interact with it, a painting hidden behind a flat wall of paint. Going against the grain, against common sense, is also design. It might be the hardest kind of design, to temporarily throw all preconceived notions out of the window and relearn the world from scratch.
And let us never forget that we try and do this notwithstanding the awe inducing breadth of differences and similarities between us. The world of design if amazing and infinite. It unites and it separates. It builds, breaks and rebuilds. In a way, our world is design. And design just… Is.
-- o. maag
Linocut on paper, black ink on white, 10.5 × 14.8 cm
REX, 2025
The focus falls on an object so familiar it often goes unnoticed: the REX peeler. Designed and produced in Switzerland since 1947, it has become a quiet icon of everyday design.
Rendered in black-and-white linocut, the work highlights its form through texture and contrast. A single piece of metal, comfortable in either hand, with a small eye remover seamlessly integrated, every detail is purposeful.
Born from necessity during military service, the peeler becomes in print a quiet study of simplicity, function, and enduring form.
untitled
There is this video of an old Dieter Rams pointing at things with his cane, appropriately titled on YouTube “Dieter Rams points at things he doesn’t like”.
Old men point at things they don’t like all the time and that doesn’t mean that one should, per se, listen to them on account of the pointing alone but in this case, at least some attention is warranted. Dieter Rams is a legendary German industrial designer, best know for his work for Braun, and for formulating the influential “Ten Principles of Good Design”.
His motto “Weniger, aber besser” (“less, but better”), which could have been written in 2010, and his principles involving innovation, aesthetics, usability, unobtrusiveness, among others, have become a cornerstone of modern design thinking and influenced many companies, notably one of today’s largest manufacturer of consumer goods: Apple.
I am split on design thinking as a concept, mainly because of it’s propensity to be used in terrible LinkedIn posts or MBA seminars but, in essence, it is an important doctrine. It’s main contribution is a human-centred, iterative approach to solving complex problems, understanding users deeply and creating solutions that meet their needs. Apart from LinkedIn and MBA seminars the framework is used in innovation, product development, UX/UI, and, more recently, business strategy. Design itself on the other hand, refers to the actual creation of products, visuals, systems, or experiences. It is more about the craft and execution, while design thinking is about approach and mindset.
With that out of the way we can go back to Dieter Rams and Apple. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had a deep fascination for the guy and the industrial design of many of the company’s (flagship) products is strongly influenced by mid-century Braun products. With the advent of digital interfaces, Apple doubled down and started a fateful chapter in UX design (atrociously) named: Skeuomorphism; in which digital interfaces mimicked the appearance and functionality of real-world objects. The goal was to make technology feel familiar and intuitive by replicating textures, shadows, and physical characteristics.
Apple famously used skeuomorphic design in early versions of iOS and macOS. Examples include the Notes app looking like a yellow legal pad, the Calendar app resembling a leather-bound desk calendar, the Bookshelf in iBooks mimicking wooden shelves, and - notably - the calculator App resembling a Braun GNI 001.
Luckily we, as a society - and not without much struggle - managed to move away from UX Skeuomorphism in favour of flat designs, which offer more clarity and simplicity, taking into account the fact that people are now used to digital interfaces and don’t need to be tricked into thinking they are interacting with real world objects. Commentators complain, however, as they always do (and in part due to lack of other things to complain about), about the lack of consistency in modern-day interfaces (the “I can’t use my phone after the update” complaint) and in some sense of lack of accessibility, as well as disregard for functionality (readability, etc) of recent flat redesigns.
In later years it seems that UX design language is moving into a new phase, especially with the rise of new visual languages, such as “Liquid Glass” (very reminiscent of Windows Vista), which includes real-time lensing and refraction, reacting to environmental changes, possibly in preparation for a future in which computer interfaces will be overlayered on reality, rather than accessed through screens.
I wonder how Dieter Rams would react to all of this, would he point his cane in approval or murmur something semi-coherent about “kids these days”? My gut feeling is that a designer of his calibre would appreciate the nuances of the movement from the physical world of industrial design to the digital realm of UX and ultimately to the next step of ephemeral interfaces beamed straight into our consciousnesses.
However, I would equally like to listen to a rant about how modern UX design is fundamentally at odds with his design principles, and generally incomprehensible in many ways, as I am sure most of us feel, at least some of the time.
