The wickedness of designers (Part 1)

Our radio alarm clock needs to be replaced, and this is prompting deep thoughts about design. The clock’s defect is that when we have a power cut it switches off the stored alarm time, sending it to a default setting of midnight; which means when the power flicks off and on in the night, something that happens several times a year when there are storms, we’re either woken at midnight, or not woken at all. New radio alarms have a system that updates the clock automatically, by receiving signals from somewhere in, I believe, Rugby. So I have decided to find a new clock. This has caused me to reflect on what other qualities I would want in the device. My list is not eccentric, I think: I want large numerals that I can see across the room; I want a display that is not cluttered with other information such as temperature (I can feel that) or day and date (I don’t need to know that in the night); I want control buttons that are easy to access and set the alarm in a simple way; and I do not want all the control knobs to be so designed that they are identical to each other. This makes it hard to locate the key knobs as I fumble sleepily at the machine before going to bed. Not an over-demanding list. But what do I find? Tiny buttons hidden down the side, rows of buttons all the same as each other on which I have to shine a raking light to work out which is which, spindly numeral displays, and modes of setting the alarm time that require three hands operating independently.

Who designs these things? Why haven’t they learned from companies like Apple that there’s money to be made from sheer simplicity?

A further source of grief relates specifically to digital radios. I have one that sits in the bathroom which takes 15 seconds after I press the ON button to come on, and stays on for several seconds after I turn it off. Why? It sounds such a small thing, but until the radio comes on I’m not sure what volume it’s going to produce, and because I get up earlier than Virginia I don’t like to blast the Today programme at her through the bathroom door as she sleeps. This means I must hover over the radio until it deigns to wake up, and give a hasty twist to the volume control if necessary. And for all those 15 seconds I’m desperate to have a pee. No doubt newer models have overcome this strange sleepiness (of the radio, not me), but when I bought it there was nothing to tell me it had this defect.

Why is the radio market so poorly served? I think there are two reasons. First, it’s mostly older people who buy radios, and this sector of the market finds it hard to imagine that things could ever be other than they are. When I complain to my friends about the poor design of radio buttons they look astonished. Radios have always looked this way, they seem to say. How could it be otherwise? So there’s no market pressure to create more user-friendly devices. And secondly, I blame industrial designers.

These wicked people are in love with symmetry, elegance, and formal pattern. Given a dozen buttons to arrange, they’ll place them in three rows of four, make them all identical, and colour them the same as the body of the device (almost always black: how they love black). What I want is a big fat button for ON/OFF, and buttons of different shapes, sizes and colours for other functions so that I can find them with my eyes half-closed. Why are designers so obsessed with orderliness? I don’t want to be tidied up in this way. I have a further suspicion, which is that this is a male characteristic, and that most industrial designers are men. They don’t want to be user-friendly, they want to be user-controlling. Look at the dashboards of cars. When I drive I have my eyes on the road, I don’t want to have to send out a search party to identify which of the line of identical buttons does what. How about a dashboard of bumps that squish and switches that click and wheels that twiddle and levers that go up and down?

Muddle it up, guys. Our brains enjoy that. But I know I might as well piss into the wind. No car manufacturer will ever dare to offer a vehicle instrument panel that doesn’t look like a cross between a fighter plane cockpit and an operating theatre. Driving is strong and clean and pure and male… Please God, raise me up a generation of female designers who build machines that are odd-shaped and knobbly and fit my hands.