Recently, I enjoyed reading a piece by Cabel Sasser, “Fantasy Meets Reality”, on how so much design doesn’t really quite work in the real world. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, and he gives a number of fascinating examples. My personal favourite is the curved wall that caused so many injuries as people tried to climb up the damn thing, that eventually some brand new seating was placed at the base in order to stop people trying.
Cabel continues:
“But honestly, a lot of it, I think, is just that some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. That beautiful thing you’re working on, it lives in a window on your monitor tucked under a title bar, and that’s as tricky as it gets. What if you can’t imagine your thing in its final context? What if you aren’t great at predicting human behaviors other than your own? What if you push a worst-case scenario out of your mind because you like your idea so much that it’s “at least worth trying”? (I’ve done this!) Maybe you’ve forgotten how you would goof around with your friends to make them laugh way back when. Or maybe, a little bit sadly, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to experience the world as a kid. Not everyone will, or can, have these skills.
It almost seems like there’s a real job here for the right type of person. “Real World Engineer”? Unfortunately, the closest thing most companies currently have is ‘lawyer’.”
John Gruber, in reponse:
“Design is for humans, and needs to account for how people do behave, not how they should.”
* * *
The whole of the above article is worth reading, with its brilliant examples of design gone wrong in the real world. I have also experienced things exactly like this… but perhaps in a slightly different context to most people.
Because my day job – and indeed night job – is as a TV channel director. I’ve done this for many channels and many companies over the last 15 years. And one recurring thing which happens is that a piece of material is delivered which works excellently as a standalone thing, but comes woefully short when placed in context with everything else.1
An ident which looks great, but runs out and freezes before the announcement can say all it needs to say. Another ident which has endless shot changes, so you can’t cleanly get into a programme. A menu graphic which only allows announcements of a set length, when it needs to shrink or expand as required. Trails or promos which freeze unpleasantly at the end, so when you run them for slightly longer than scheduled for timing reasons, they look strange.
And it strikes me that this is exactly the same issue that Cabel Sasser is describing above. Objects that are great in and of themselves, but don’t work in the real world; it’s an identical issue to presentation elements which work brilliantly in isolation, but don’t work in the context of actually putting a channel together for real.
Except that I’m a little less sympathetic than Cabel is. I don’t think “Real World Engineer” should be a thing. Whether you’re designing benches or TV channel presentation, thinking about how your creation will be used in the real world is part of your actual job. Things which work in theory but don’t work in practice are simply bad design, and if the person who designed them continue to make the same mistakes, they’re just a bad designer.
Designing for practicality is usually a win-win situation to boot. I said at the top of this article that my favourite example Cabel gives was the additional seating on the curved wall. OK, so maybe the structure isn’t quite as elegant-looking once that seating was added. Fair enough. But it sure as hell is more useful than it was before.
The same goes for pres elements. The ident that now runs long enough to allow the correct length announcements; the ident with no shot changes so it looks good going into the programme; menus which can run at any length; trails which don’t freeze awkwardly at the end. Maybe our theoretical designer might feel restricted by having to follow irritating rules. But the end result, in the real world, is a far more useful piece of design which actually does its job, which is far more important than anything nice and theoretical which sits in our designer’s head.
Design is the real world application of a strong idea. Anything else is mere floofiness. It isn’t a separate job. It should be baked into anything a designer does. No matter what you’re designing.
I would point out that all the below examples are deliberately shorn of any identifying information, so don’t try and apply these to any specific channel or company. ↩