Thackara, John - In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

[oyceter]

Another book I read for class.

Thackara is trying to look at the job of a designer in an increasingly complex world, as per the subtitle of his book. I found this book immensely frustrating to read; it is so broad in scope that I kept wanting more citations, more everything. So I was arguing with Thackara every step of the way.

It also didn't help that I felt like he just had a lot of cool ideas and rants but didn't really tie them together. He wrote in one chapter on how we should try and imitate nature more (the much cited example of barnacles sticking like mad but detaching with no trace), but in another, he writes on how in our attempts to imitate nature, we end up creating an even larger environmental footprint. He writes about things that I do think are important, like the environment and trying to figure ethical implications in design, but he does so in such a general way that it is frustrating.

He says stuff about the complexity of systems and cites examples of failures of design and says that it must be solved, but I feel he doesn't give more steps to solve them. I mean, I know complex systems are hard! And bad design! I know that smart machines often assume too much! But what I want to know is how to fix them, and I think that is a much, much, much more complicated thing than pointing out the problem. Also, I felt he wasn't even pointing out the problem in an original way; I think I have read all those criticisms in Wired and other magazines before.

Possibly I was not Thackara's intended audience and the book was meant to be more theoretical.

Comments

[badger2305.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you've ever seen Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World? It's a bit old, but still quite relevant today (or so it seems to me).

[oyceter]

I haven't, thanks for the rec!

[chomiji]

I'm just curious - does he go into accommodation for the disabled at all?

[oyceter]

Um... screwy, I don't remember. I would say no, because I feel like I would have remembered because accessability is important and something I've been trying to look at for usability.

[chomiji]

That's something I've always fussed about, ever since my late mother became disabled from a stroke, and suddenly it all became very real for me. Our current office building, only 3 years old, was designed to be very arty and dramatic ... and it's damn near disabled-hostile. From the entry lobby, to get to the elevators at all, you have to go down a steep flight of shiny granite stairs. It's going to cost a couple of hundred thousand in retrofitting to add an elevator that can be reached without using those stairs. So stupid!

[oyceter]

*nods* Yes. I really hate user-unfriendly designs or designs that are there to look good but are near unusable.