Sometimes, I really feel stupid when I start bitching around about some bad design (like Microsoft applications … or Adobe Illustrator …) and then being told by my family/friends/colleagues that they really don’t understand what my problem is, that this specific thing is just the way it is, and that one has to cope with it, and that’s it then.

Most of the time, this won’t calm me down. I just can’t stop fuming, because I’m so stumped by the designer’s complete lack of understanding of the context the product is being used in – which in my eyes is one of the most important parts in good design.

And yes, that may mean that I even bash Philippe Starck: his Juicer might be considered a design icon by some, but in fact it’s completely unable to perform the task it was supposedly designed to do — makes it pretty bad design for me.

Luckily, I now realised that I’m not the only one who gets angry at bad design. Mathieu Tozer rages about the Southern Cross Railway Station, which obviously is so badly (de)signed that people miss one train after another.

Like said, I didn’t think I was stupid, but for a moment there I thought, maybe I am. But the fact that this has happened twice, and I have whitnessed the confusion with other passengers today, I conclude that it is the design of the station, not people’s stupidity, that has caused me to miss my train.

Although initially I didn’t think the overall architecture of the station was bad, my admiration soured over time. I saw some pictures of some of the proposed alternatives, and now I always look at what was built and think of what it could have been. Anyway, it’s not that bad, and could put up with it if it were functional.

Why do I or Mathieu or anybody else have to cope with crappy design — if there would be so many ways to do it better? Why can some designers (of every kind) just fabricate some fancy stuff, without ever thinking about putting it into use and context, and thousands of people have to think of “workarounds” to use it in a pseudo-efficient way?

Why is the world not as perfect as I want it to be?

Tagsoup: design, Interaction Design