The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

In retrospect, the French decision seems so foolish that it is hard to fathom how it could have been made. After much study, designers came up with a silver-colored coin made of nickel and featuring a modernistic drawing by artist Joaquim Jimenez of a Gallic rooster on one side and of Marianne, the female symbol of the French republic, on the other. The coin was light, sported special ridges on its rim for easy reading by electronic vending machines and seemed tough to counterfeit. But the designers and bureaucrats were obviously so excited by their creation that they ignored or refused to accept the new coin’s similarity to the hundreds of millions of silver-colored, nickel-based half-franc coins in circulation [whose] size and weight were perilously similar. (Stanley Meisler. Copyright © 1986, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.)