Henri Petroski on Car Design
Everything was fabulous except for the fact that if it rained while we were on a ride somewhere, gradually the carriage would fill up with water while the child sat in it! Not only that, it was certainly a challenge to empty it too! The upgrade? It has two grommet holes in its base, beneath where the child actually sits, so that water can drain out! Marvelous! The added benefit: If you use it for carrying shopping instead, it too will remain dry!
After reading Drink Me: How Americans came to have Cup holders in their cars, by Henri Petroski (Slate, Washington Post, 2004), I recalled the changes made to an original baby bike stroller. We were given such an item to use when riding with our grandson: admittedly it was second, third or even fourth hand but it was in great shape.
Everything was fabulous except for the fact that if it rained while we were on a ride somewhere, gradually the carriage would fill up with water while the child sat in it! Not only that, it was certainly a challenge to empty it too! The upgrade? It has two grommet holes in its base, beneath where the child actually sits, so that water can drain out! Marvelous! The added benefit: If you use it for carrying shopping instead, it too will remain dry!Returning to the article mentioned above: Petroski contemplates the rise of the cup holder, so to speak, as a now essential feature in our cars. Imagine, he writes, trying to drink out of a cup as you rode in one of the early type cars! You just wouldn't consider it--too bumpy by far. However, eating and drinking in a parked car was part of the adventures of drive-in restaurants and theaters. Petroski posits that perhaps the tray that hooked onto the side of the car window frame prompted the design of the now pervasive cup holder. He goes on to describe the many iterations of the cup holder design concepts and products and links these designs to the advent of new cup material and shape technologies. There are the amusing aspects too of cup holder designs that impede safe driving by obstructing controls and the fact that people apparently often want to know the number of cup holders provided before any interest is seriously shown in a particular vehicle! For Petroski, this is not quite correct: he maintains that it is the design of the cup holders, not their number, that can convince people to buy one vehicle rather than another!
I am so amused by this article and want you to read his message of hope at its conclusion:
"But consumers can expect that cup holders will continue to be improved, like all made things. (One thing to look for is a spring-loaded flap that acts like the rubber ones found on so many cup holder designs: It keeps cups smaller than the holder from jiggling and rattling.) Meanwhile, drivers and passengers alike can still dream of one that will hold whatever size drink container they can buy at a roadside convenience store. This dream cup holder will not obstruct a single other thing in the car and will hold a cup steady on a rocky road. The future cup holder, one can further dream, will move under a cup being put down by a driver watching the road the way an outfielder moves under a fly ball. Truly visionary drivers might even fantasize of the robot cup holder that can move a cup into a hand groping in the dark." (Henry Petroski, 2004, Drink Me)
Actually, Petroski includes a quote from Donald Norman's 2004 book, Emotional Design, in which he criticizes an automobile design culture that "proclaims that the engineer knows best, and considers studies of real people driving their vehicles irrelevant" (p. 73).
In Form Follows Failure, Chapter 2 of The Evolution of Useful Things (1992), Petroski argues that the phrase "form follows function" is misleading and that in reality "form follows failure." This implies that a particular design for an item can be traced through the various problems of earlier iterations and finding out how each iteration tried to solve a problem from the one before. As he writes, the central idea is, "the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly" (p. 22). Products are, in other words, always on their journey toward perfection: each iteration is an approximation of the ultimate design-- hence the changes in design of the child bike carriage above!
Of particular note for the development of our own products and their subsequent evaluation is the following from the same chapter:
"The distinctly human activities of invention, design, and development are themselves not so distinct as the separate words for them imply, and in their use of failure these endeavors do in fact form a continuum of activity that determines the shapes and forms of every made object." (p. 32)
Here is a design for a glass for drinking a lot: Glass Tank, designed and manufactured by Kyouei Design. Any thoughts?
I have a thought!
Let's drink to the Positives of Failure! Cheers!
