32 Comments
Mar 9, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

This is a wonderful essay, full of surprising little gems, like "People hate pushing a pull door, but they don’t think at all when they push a push door." It also made my blood boil when I began to reflect on all the examples of lousy psychological design in my life.

I visited the MooD website and concluded that it must be a hoax, since only deliberate malevolence could design such a lousy page.

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Aug 14, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

Nice. Writing to say "A Pattern Language" by Alexander et al is a good book for ideas about design for human living spaces.

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Mar 28, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

"Bathrooms should be wheelchair accessible and easy to clean, but designers are probably not going to invite people who use wheelchairs to test out their bathrooms, nor are they going to try scrubbing behind the toilets." Why... why not? They definitely should try these things!

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May 4, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

Excellent essay. I read The Design of Everyday things and it changed my life. Glad to know I was not alone.

And LOL at MOOD website. Click on any of the green exhibition links and you get this:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in /nfs/c04/h06/mnt/58482/domains/museumofdesign.com/html/asistant.php:

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May 4, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

Your post mentioned the elusiveness of the Museum of Design. In 2012 they put on a temporary exhibition in Como, Italy.. See https://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/6/prweb9635678.htm. Unclear if the Museum has appeared again in the physical world since 2012. The domain belongs to OMC Design Studios of Como.

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Mar 30, 2022Liked by Adam Mastroianni

I enjoyed this post tremendously. I would very much like to visit the MuPE when it’s built and filled with all the amazing improvements we don’t even know we need.

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In lean manufacturing they have a name for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

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Living in Japan for five years has made me so used to amazing design and be helplessly impatient with bad design when I travel to places where I minimally expect a somewhat acceptable design. Great essay!

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I got to your second “I’m against racism” virtue signal and died of cringe before I was able to finish the article

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I like the essay but you're wrong about microwaves. We recently had a microwave that didn't keep beeping; it was terrible and had to be replaced. The repeated beep is successful psychological engineering.

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You said so much that needed to be said, and there's so much more to say. My one issue: I find it hard to believe that someone cannot imagine not-knowing. What you call psychological design, I called intuitive design that involved two things: First, observing those who were going to be using my eventual design to see how they worked and operated; and while designing, mentally imagining myself knowing absolutely nothing while seeking to get where I needed to go in the fewest, most direct, most logical steps possible. As a result, the systems I designed didn't need instruction manuals or education classes. The "end user" as we called them, then, just enjoyed being able to do their jobs, efficiently and flawlessly. To be blunt: I think that being able to imagine not knowing anything is about empathy - you have to WANT to understand another person's point of view. You have to WANT to be in service to others more than yourself. And that, my friend, is the deeper problem - a problem that is solved simply by making the choice to care about what matters.

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Bathroom engineering: people knock. So if you are able to reach a hard surface knock, back with the same rhythm. Tap-taptaptap. "Tap-taptaptap". It freaks them out a bit, but it's a clear message that doesn't require using ones voice during that intimate and sacred moment.

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Ok I absolutely love this idea! Start the kickstarter.

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> Anyone who can overcome these challenges is rewarded with indifference

I think it's actually much worse than indifference, and that's a big part of the problem. Most people are very bad at coping with the idea that other people have different perspectives. If the door is perfectly intuitive to them, they are deeply resistant to the idea that it's confusing to others, and so they look for other explanations. Someone who says the door is unintuitive to them must be stupid, or lying for some strange reason. Such a person deserves not indifference, but contempt. And the same to the charlatan who produces a "solution" to this fake problem.

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Adam, I think you meant to hyperlink to this page re queue design: https://jamesrobertwatson.com/quelines.html

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You are the only person aside from myself who I have ever noticed noticing the microwave that will not stop "helpfully" beeping to make me come get the food. And that you cannot turn it off.

This kind of thing is in my mind constantly. How, today, machines are designed in the inverse of how they should be.

That is, they are designed so that humans serve their desires, rather than the machines being tuned to human needs and convenience.

Anyone actually thinking about the user--the very person the product is designed for--could not fail to understand this. Apparently, no one thinks of the user.

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