Indirection. That’s doing something apparently irrelevant to achieve a goal. For example, you want to record, say, Wayne Hemmingways classic appearance on the Art Show about branded home furnishings (the Versace Teapot? Really?… but I digress). You want to record the Art Show, right? But to do this you have to input the TIMES of the Art Show … starts at 20.00 ends at 20.30. Thats indirection that has been required because of the nature of the artifact - the recorder that works in time.

“When is the next train to East Didsbury?” is another question that I often have. Previously I had to be ‘indirected’ to find out what line the East Didsbury train ran on. I had to go find the timetable. If East Didsbury wasn’t the final destination for the train (which it never is) I might have to struggle to interpret the time. So I’m well pleased with the new Board at Manchester Station. I want to find the time of the train? No timetable indirection, no interpretation, not hard. The board lists the places trains go to from Manchester and the times that they go next. No messing, no indirection: This is Good!

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OK, OK already, I hear the designers saying, this emotion stuff is all well and good, but its pretty secondary to our aesthetic sensibilities. The logic always is going to win. We are always going to be able to control and moderate our deep urges and feelings with our higher senses.

Well, Spock, I’d say no. And I came across a good example of this the other day when the family went down the airport for a look at planes as it was another rainy sunday in Manchester.

Part of the fun with a two year old is always the moving walkways. They don’t go very fast (the walkways that is, kids go like a bomb), but kids are fascinated as they feel themselves moving when their legs aren’t. But as adults too we have expectations of these walkways, and the motor control of our bodies based on our perceptions. And these expectations cause true visceral feelings. The one I’m homing in on is when you stand on a moving walkway that isn’t moving. If you are like me you feel a huge lurch where your body wants to accomodate the movement … but the movement is not there, the walkway is static.

Now what in the world is logical about that? I KNOW the walkway isn’t moving, I’ve seen it, understood it, accepted it. I absolutely know it. The walkway is just not going. But my body won’t accept this. No amount of Mr Spock will make the visceral lurching go away. Emotions beat logic everytime. Its not even a fair fight … if there is a fight, then put logic away, it hasn’t got a chance.

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I think that Wayne Hemingway is really one of our top designers. The new Bug radio from Pure allows you to ‘rewind’ radio and get the most from the digital distribution of a traditional analogue medium.

Uptake of hard drive PVRs like Sky is producing just hasn’t caught on yet. I don’t quite know why, but it may be that people just dont get the fact that it is possible, nay even concievable that you can ’stop’ and ’start’ tele. Just doesn’t seem right. But radio might just steal a march on the TV. The conceptual model of analogue audio tape might allow for the mass market to ‘get’ this digital concept quicker.

And to Mr Hemingway… I am sure he would be quite flattered that I consider him to be the William Morris of this generation. With his work concentrating on good and affordable design with the likes of Wimpy Homes and others, he makes the other designers who are focussing on high end and unaffordable look a trifle sad. This is design for the rest of us, and I’m glad someone is doing it, and being digital to boot.

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The web started as hypertext … a loose collection of pages held together as unstructured mass in cyberspace. And many financial sites still are structured this way … with no paths or flows, just a find-your-way-around approach. Now thats OK for a content rich site, or even a news site, where where you navigate to next depends on what you fancy at the time. But knowing about a financial product demands you see more pages and often in a particular order. John Charcol at www.charcolonline.com understand this and have structured their site around a set of well-trod paths that prospects can follow. It means that you get answers to questions rather than gaps in knowledge, it means that finding things gets easy as things are where you expect to find them … and it means they do pretty damn well online for a difficult and high-cost product.

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As well as being obsessed by road crossings, I seem also to be involved in a big way with trains. Maybe its because I spend so much time on them. I have already discussed the use of bags as restraints for cooler compartments, and toilet door instructions.

Aspects of the design of artifacts on trains seem poor. There may be no reason for this, no plan, but it appears to just be the case. For example, here is a picture of a button operated door. The instructions appear in the middle of the door, very much where you would look, but the buttons to which the instructions apply are a way away on the left.

Two things. First, if you need to write instructions about a device, then that device is poorly designed with few if any affordances to ‘do-the-right-thing’ in place. Second, if you have to right instructions, they might be a least *close* to the thing to which they instruct the use!

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