Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Bad Design
Uploaded: 2019-03-20
Duration: 12 min 58 s
Description: Why is so much design so bad? And given that bad design has as much impact on our lives than good design, why is it so rarely discussed?

Well, as Clay says, I'm going to be the party pooper, and instead of telling you about these glorious design success stories, I'm going to talk about a couple of the flops and failures, because we tend to ignore bad design at events Like this and design books, festivals, podcasts, blogs, documentaries, exhibitions, and so on, to focus on its successes, but I believe that's a mistake, because bad design, unfortunately, is abundant in our lives. It has just as much, if not more impact on us. From the good variety, and of course it could incredibly expensive in terms of time, money, emotion, effort, and energy to repair the damage that it causes. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So, i'm going to look at seven form Of bad design. It's by no means an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea and a sort of cautionary warning of what can happen when design goes wrong. So the first category is one of the commonest and that is Useless design. These are the design projects that simply fail to fulfill their functions efficiently. And if you're a Londoner like me or you visit our city you will become all too familiar with this. The sight of a broken down bus being trolled off the streets. This is what we Londoners call a Boris Bus. It was launched in 2012 by a then mad the buffoonish Boris Johnson and obviously nicknamed after him. I gather you are all familiar with his heroic efforts as Foreign Secretary, after he stopped being mayor. So he launched the [ UNKNOWN ] with greater plans saying it's going to be a new icon for London. A fuel efficient reinvention of the beloved route master double decker buses that were introduced in the post war era Now the Boris bus I think anyway, looks rather good. Thanks to Thomas Heatherwick and his studio who designed the interior and the bodywork. The problem is the lousy quality of its design engineering. These buses broke down frequently. The batteries often conked out, so it had to switch to environmentally damaging diesel engines. And it was prone to overheating, so much so that its passengers nicknamed it the Roastmaster. [ LAUGH ] Unsurprisingly, Boris' successor Sadiq Khan has axed the Boris bus completely, so it will soon be taken off the streets for good. But that is a kind of design project that can fulfill its function efficiently unlike the [ INAUDIBLE ] bus. And yet is still badly designed, because that function isn't something we value. And this is what I would call pointless Design. And I suspect an example of this will be a product that was launched last week. It's the new Nokia smartphone, the 9, which has the proud boast of including not one, two, three, four, but five cameras. Now, I am sorry, but who needs a phone with five cameras. Obviously we don't. Next up is irresponsible design. This is of course refers to design projects whose designers haven't thought rigorously enough about their consequences and places like this absolutely full of them. This is the hideous Agbogbloshie dump. A notorious digital dump outside Accra in Ghana. This is why thousands of computers, phones, tablets and other digital devices [ UNKNOWN ] failed to decomposed, poisoning the ground for decades if not centuries to come. And the cruel irony is that most of this stuff would never have ended up there Had it been designed responsibly. For example, take a fairly modest component of digital devices, copper wire. It's very valuable and it's very easy to recycle. Unless it's covered with black rubber, as unfortunately most copper wire for digital devices is. But because black is invisible to the optical sensors that control recycling plants They automatically reject the cup of wire and send it straight to landfill so it can't be recovered. But, only to design it take more time and trouble to ensure that it was designed, so they could be disposed of a recycle responsibly so much of this stuff. In places like the [ UNKNOWN ] dump could have been put to good use. Then there's unreliable design. And an example is the ball that you can literally see in the back of the net. It's one of the most expensive Highly RND'd and heavily promoted products that's launched every four years that Adidas introduces it as the new official football for the World Cup tournament. And, Adidas assembles a crack team of designers, engineers, and technologists To work on it. Now, the objective is always the same, it's to try and produce a board that will ensure that the world cup games are even faster, more exciting and more dynamic than their predecessors. Well also critically preserving the elemental sporting principle of fair play. To ensure that the ball behaves in the same matter at all times. So, no one team have an unfair advantage over the others. But, unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. Take this particular World Cup. The Jabulani. It was designed for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and it was pretty effective, certainly exciting. The only problem was that it was discovered that it behaved very differently at different altitudes. Which might not have mattered had it not been for the fact that many of the South African cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town where the games were played really were very, very different altitudes. So this miserable figure you can see crouching woebegone. In the goal mouth is Robert Green, who was England's goal keeper at the time. He has just conceded an own goal, that's every goalie's worst nightmare, in a critical game against the US and he blamed the [ UNKNOWN ] . Normally we would write that off as sour grapes. But because so many other goalies complained that it was unreliable too It probably was quite right. But there are also design projects that fall into the category of what I would call good intentions but. They were admirably conceived, but somehow went horribly awry. And one was initiated by IBM, when a couple of years ago, it decided, admirably, that it wanted to address the problem of the dearth of women in tech. And so it commissioned a social media campaign showing the amazing, exhilarating challenges that intelligent, highly educated, hardworking, technologically sophisticated young women could address if they entered the industry. And this was one of them, hack a hair dryer. Now, Why else would anyone aspire to anything other than that? Quite rightly IBM was ridiculed for this, it was accused of being patronising, condescending, fuddy duddy and generally sexist. All of which were criticisms that wer also levied at another company Mattel when it launched this a year ago. This is the Frida Kahlo Barbie Doll and it was launched by Mattel on international women's day last year. To as a part of a new collection of Barbie dolls called Inspiring Women, which were modeled on women of courage, which are described as rule breakers and game changers, who would encourage young girls to dream big Frida Kahlo was a brilliant candidate. An extraordinary talented artist he showed incredible bravery and overcoming severe disability, and also defined the feminine convention of her time in her appearance. She refused to shave off the big bushy mono brow across her face. And always war with great pride. folkloric Taekwondo addresses this beautiful Android addresses as a tribute to her Mexican roots. The problem was that the doll didn't exhibit any of these qualities. No mono- brow, no evidence of disability, even the clothes and hair do were wrong, they were too Europeanized. There was outrage in Mexico. Members of the Carlo family took legal action against Mattel. It was forced to withdraw the doll from sale in Mexico until changes to its design had been agreed with the family. Now I would have thought that the spectacle of such rich, powerful, well- connected global brands as IBM and Mattel being mortified and suffering huge reputational damage because of fairly basic design mistakes like these would have been a cautionary tale to other multinationals. And yet seemingly, it wasn't. Which brings us to the next category, what were they thinking? Now first up is Gucci which a couple of weeks ago was forced to issue an abject apology for this. When it was accused of reinforcing the hideous racist stereotypes of blackface. And this frankly quite revolting sweater. Then only a fortnight ago it was Burberry's turn to go on the defensive. It had to apologize when it sent a model onto the runway at London Fashion Week wearing a hoodie whose ties were arranged like a noose. One of its own models sounded the alarm by posting on her Instagram. Saying how distressed she's been when she saw the news because of its association with Racist Lynchings and also because it triggered memories of suicide within her own family. But the final category of bad design is dangerous design. And this of course comes in many forms. But I'm going to begin by talking about one that could have sale many of us. Really at any moment in every day. It's one of those dangers that literally has been hiding in plain sight, and it concerns the design of the crash test dummies that are used to test whether various vehicles Are sufficiently designed and engineered to protect the drivers and passengers from collisions and other road incidents. The problem is that in most countries, most crash test dummies are modeled on a typical male body. So anyone who doesn't have that body type is likely to be less safe in exactly the same vehicle. So that would include women like me or even men who don't conform to the classic male body type, who are perhaps smaller and slimmer than the average And to show the level of peril that this can induce, this is thought to be one of the principle reasons why women are more than 40 % likelier to be injuried in road accidents than men. That's how much damage that the design flaw can cause, and how much danger it can induce. But of course, the kind of dangers that bad design is creating are changing all the time. And at the moment, they're escalating alarmingly. And one of the principle catalysts is the development of artificial intelligence technologies and their adoption in more and more aspects of our daily lives. Now if these technologies work there are obviously Great advantages that they can bring to us. And this is something that's going to be discussed later in brainstorm designed in the breakout sessions. But if there are design flaws that make them fail, the consequences can be catastrophic. So, already, the Algorithmic Justice League in the United States has sounded the alarm about surveillance of Where, like this, was it claims that because of a flaw in its design, the data is biased. So it is significantly likelier to be accurate when identifying white males than any other group in the population. That means that the rest of us, women, People of colour and so on are less likely to be identified correctly and therefore, far more likely to be deemed whether by security services or the police forces to be a potential criminal, or potential terrorist, or perhaps to bring the immigration status into question causing massive pain, damage and disruption in people's lives and as artificial intelligence extends to more and more practical aspect of our lives whether its to robotics security guard or robotic court like this one the snooze its very easy to imagine the havoc that it could cause then again great advantages If it works efficiently, but terrible dangers if it doesn't. That's why I believe it's absolutely urgent that we get to grips with bad design. The more throughly and the sooner the better. Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: Bad Design

Design

Why is so much design so bad? And given that bad design has as much impact on our lives than good design, why is it so rarely discussed?