How many design decisions do you make every day of your life? Article by Lloyd Bradley.
The family
Dad Pete is 42, works for a shower company in the city and plays golf badly. Mum Elizabeth is 39, has just joined a local marketing firm and never misses a George Clooney movie. Son Tom is ten and manages a fantasy football team quite well.
6.52 Kettle
Tea is an essential lubricant for Pete. With his new EcoKettle he only heats as much water as he needs for a cup. That way he saves enough energy to power 50 light bulbs each time he switches the kettle on.
7.10 Bra
Elizabeth, a slow riser, is getting dressed. Like eight out of ten women she is wearing the wrong size bra. As women change shape (the average bra size rising from 34B to 36C), science will need to redesign the bra. Biomechanists say that as breasts expand, momentum problems multiply. A smart bra, using electronic fabrics and motion detectors that tightens or relaxes depending on how much support is required, is now being developed in Australia.
7.41 Children’s toothbrushes
Tom’s toothbrush is softer and has more acute angled bristles than the brush Pete used thirty years ago. With more sugar in children’s food and drink, better design became crucial. The bristles were adapted for teeth that change shape and size every day. The new handle-to-head size ratio acknowledges the fact that, proportionately, children’s hands are 20 per cent larger than adults’ hands. The brush’s shaft was widened so it could lie flat, bristles facing upwards, as most children use both hands to squeeze the toothpaste.
8.13 BlackBerry
Sitting on the train, Pete checks his BlackBerry. He already has a text from his boss who is addicted to his hand-held terminal; he’s a CrackBerry addict. Pete has read about BlackBerry thumb, a term used to describe the RSI that serious addicts may suffer (in the 1990s it was PlayStation thumb), but doesn’t yet know anyone who’s had it. Not even his boss.
8.19 The school playground
Tom waits for his friend Declan by the chessboard in the playground. His school redesigned its play area after consulting the experts – the children. The new playground has a quiet area, a ‘jungle’ and a bench where children with no one to play with meet a monitor (one of the other pupils) who’ll introduce them to other children. The chessboard is now part of a maths trail. Tom’s biggest regret? His suggestion for a helter skelter got canned.
9.17 Desktop computer
Elizabeth’s Mac booms into life. All desktop computers were once grey plastic eyesores that took up too much desk space. Then in 1998 Apple launched the iMac, a shapely translucent item that made a virtue out of displaying the circuitry and changed the way we see computers. Yet, as Pete found when he lost some files on his PC, computers retain some unique design features. Irrevocably disastrous events are only a few rogue keystrokes away.
11.15 The left-handed chequebook
Elizabeth writes out a cheque for her Barclaycard bill. Like one in ten Britons, she is left-handed and asked her bank for a left-handed chequebook. Persuading the UK’s big banks to print left-handed chequebooks was an early coup for The Left-Handers Club, formed in London in 1990. The chequebook’s spine and stub are on the right-hand side, allowing a southpaw to hold the book open and write without smudging. She’s ordered a left-handed keyboard from IT but it hasn’t arrived yet.
Mobile phone keypads are designed for the thumb, the most dextrous digit for the under-25s. Older people are much happier using their index finger
13.00 Websites
Elizabeth browses for flights. Ignoring sites that require a higher level of technology than her terminal possesses – imagine Marks & Spencer refusing to admit customers who only paid cash – she has to keep hitting search or help buttons. IBM had the same problem with its site. Search and help were the most popular features because it was so hard to navigate. On the redesigned website, use of the help button fell by 84%, while sales soared by 400%.
13.15 The Big John toilet seat
Pete spends five minutes online tracking down the Big John toilet seat, an American invention his overweight uncle who is visiting next month mentioned. Modern toilets are tested to bear 14 to 21 stone, but a surge in injuries from collapsing toilet bowls has prompted the Big John company to design larger seats. This toilet could, theoretically, hold an 80-stone man. It has a larger, contoured seating area and stabilising rubber pads to grip the porcelain. One British council has tested the Big John. Not a bad idea now that 22% of British adults are overweight.
14.15 Qwerty keyboard
At school, Tom asks his IT teacher why the letters on the computer keyboard are in such a strange order. Patented by Christopher Scholes in 1868, the Qwerty keyboard was specifically designed to slow typists down.
The metal keys that struck the paper on manual typewriters would get entangled if the typist was too fast, so this system was a) harder to use and b) usually required the operator to alternate hands, creating a natural pause between keystrokes. In 1936 Dr August Dvorak patented a simplified keyboard that was10% faster to type on. But the gain wasn’t big enough to make all the retraining and reinvesting financially worthwhile.
17.15 Cars and garages
Having picked up Tom from his nan’s, Elizabeth drives home. Changes in car design mean putting the car in the garage isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. While 53% of British households have access to a garage, only 24% use them. Today’s midsize cars occupy roughly the same space – five metres by two metres – as the luxury saloons of old. As garages increasingly become storage/utility spaces, on new houses they’re often designed to fit nothing broader than a 1.9m-wide modern MINI.
18.05 Pension statement
Pete frowns over his pension statement on the train home. Many annual pension statements are poorly designed, rendering what could be life-changing information quite complex and technical. The fact that Pete doesn’t really understand the statement leaves him with a troubling feeling of inferiority. That’s one reason Britons spend 40% more time reading a gas bill than their pension statement.
19.10 Diabetics’ sports shoes
Pete jogs across the park in sports shoes designed to minimise the risk posed by the fact that, like 1.6million Britons, he has diabetes. Reacting to a surge in Type 2 diabetes, Asics has designed a running/walking shoe for sufferers. With diabetes, high blood sugar levels damage nerve endings so feet can go numb, tingle or just hurt. As blood flow is restricted, cuts or blisters can get infected. These trainers come in wider fittings, have larger openings and special midsoles to reduce pressure on the wearer’s soles and dissipate shock. The seamless insides of the uppers help avoid blistering.
19.30 The TV set
Tom watches a rerun of That’s So Raven on the TV in his bedroom. Officially, he is only allowed to watch TV for two hours a day. A New Zealand study found that 41% of overweight adults watched TV for more than two hours a day as children. Tom keeps getting told off for leaving his set on standby. But, as he told his dad, if the government were really serious about saving energy they’d pass a law that all TVs must have an eco-friendly standby button.
20.05 Kitchen design
Despite – or because of? – the celebrity chef epidemic, half of us spend less than 30 minutes cooking dinner (and 15% of American meals are eaten in the car). Elizabeth, who is cooking tonight, wants to redo the kitchen. Her counters are 36in high – the average height in kitchens – but 42in would lessen the back strain for Pete who is over 6ft tall, as are 30% of British men under the age of 25.
20.32 Mobile phones
Tom texts a friend about his maths homework. Elizabeth wasn’t sure about buying him a mobile, but a million children between the ages of five and nine now have one. Is that why they’re designed for young people? Much of the information on them is too small to be recognised comfortably by those over 40 (when human visual acuity starts to plummet) and the keypads are designed for thumb use, the most dextrous digit for the under-25s, rather than the index finger, which people use more as they get older. Pete wants a Vodafone Simply phone with a bigger screen and larger buttons for those who just want to call and text.
21.55 Surround sound audio
The demand for a cinema-quality experience from DVDs calls for grander soundscapes, yet shrinking living rooms in new houses and conversions can’t accommodate vast audio systems with kilometres of cables. As the new digital TVs are wall-mounted and almost as slim as a picture frame, buyers are loath to fill the reclaimed space with a chunky home cinema system and sub-woofer. That’s why, last week, Pete bought a Yamaha YSP-1 digital sound projector. This box – 118mm deep, 194mm high and only 1,030mm wide – delivers convincing surround sound by focusing the different channels into separate beams of sound and cannoning them off the room’s wall.
24.00 And so to bed
Everyone is asleep, but Britain might sleep easier if, over the last 50 years, the average size of a semi-detached house hadn’t shrunk from 153m2 with four bedrooms to 86m2 with three bedrooms. Many bedrooms are too small to house the king- and queen-size beds 50% of bed buyers want. So 70% of beds sold in Britain are 135cm by 190cm, the narrowest and third shortest most popular bed size in the world. Usually, the larger the bed, the better we sleep, and lack of sleep isn’t good for Britain’s health. Fifty years ago we slept nine hours a night. That average is now seven hours and falling. Research suggests that people who get only five hours shut eye a night are 15% more likely to become obese than those who get seven hours.
Redesigning treatment for diabetes
In our typical family, Pete manages his diabetes. Many sufferers don’t.
Every week in Bolton, 29 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes from a population of just 220,000. This isn’t unusual. The NHS spends £10,000 a minute treating diabetes.
RED, the Design Council’s R&D group, worked with designers, health policy experts, psychologists, economists, doctors and Angela, a local woman diagnosed with diabetes, to help sufferers manage their health and make the NHS more efficient.
Angela had no trouble taking her medication – her challenges were diet and exercising. She lacked motivation so just pumping more cash into the NHS wouldn’t help. RED found that diabetics needed help putting what they knew into practice – and, with Angela’s fellow sufferers, prototyped ideas to help.
A set of ‘agenda cards’ changed the way patients talked to doctors. A phrase was printed on each card – always something the RED team had heard a sufferer say, such as “It’s hard to know what to eat”.
Before a consultation, patients chose the two cards that affected them most, rather than just running through the standard questions.Patients had not always been truthful when quizzed but the cards changed that, giving them the chance to put their agenda first.
Health professionals, initially skeptical, soon found they spent two minutes – not ten as they had before – identifying a patient’s main problem and had more time to support the patient’s needs.
Many people picked the card: “I need someone to coach me through this”. So the team prototyped a ‘diabetes coach’ – a life coach who wasn’t a health professional but could help motivate sufferers, either individually or in groups.
By asking sufferers to help redesign their treatment, RED and the Bolton Diabetes Network made a real difference to patients’ lives and devised a model for a new user-centred healthcare approach.