Petroski is at his best when he brings forth the virtues of artefacts like the plastic “thing†that keep a pizza box top from touching the pizza, or the grocer’s brown paper bag. He considers that everything is designing, inverting the modernist tendency of the Design Methods people to that designing is decision making / problem solving. He makes a case of everyday decision making as designing: eg you don’t order a meal; you design it.
History of an oject that gets worn through use and is molded in the shape of its owner. Norman in an interview mentioned that one guy tried to give his Palm this worn-attractive look by throwing it away and getting it scratched: it didn’t work (you can’t rush history!). Another fact noticed by Petroski, is that sometimes a new design is in fact worse than the one it successfuly replaced: the plastic bottles of designer water are often as infected with germs as the communal cups they replaced.
Petroski attributes some of the problems on failure to notice infrastructure (in his water cooler example, p. 40). One possible reason for this I believe is that often the infrastructure itself is problematic because it doesn’t allow proper slippage of its layers (see Brand, 1994; Papantoniou, 2006). This point is crucial as the artefact is always altered (designed?) in unpredictable ways in a context of use (Petroski himself recognizes this, noting that experienced designers deign walkways in parks after they’ve been trodden). This is the issue I have with this book: it lacks a systemic view. This is evident when Petroski discusses infrastructure heavy systems like toll booths. All in all this is an interesting book, but the lack of theory makes it more of the same. Useful as a teaching aid (lots of examples), and pleasant reading, but not essential.
References
Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn. New York: Viking.
Papantoniou, B. (2006). Ergonomic Design of Information Systems Using a Pragmatic Approach. Unpublished PhD thesis, Mechanical Engineering Department, NTUA
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