Door design.
Have you ever thought about door design? Well actually I didn't think about it very much until I read a book about design.
And the guy who wrote the book, he showed a really interesting example of a door that people couldn't open, They came up to the door, they looked at it, they kind of knew it was a door, but they didn't know how to open it.
And he used that as an example of bad design.
Now I could talk more about that example, but let's go into sort of door design in general.
What is the door supposed to do? You can't design the door until you know what it's supposed to do? Well basically doors separate spaces and they separate the spaces for a couple of reasons.
One is safety.
You can imagine that we want to keep a child in a room because if they go out of the room, they might come close to the stairs and fall down.
That's a real danger for young Children.
So then we want doors for safety security.
I want to keep things inside my room secure.
That means other people can't get them and take them away from me.
So I want to have a lock on the door and I want the door to be strong and difficult to open when I want it to be difficult to open.
And then then there's the last one privacy, I closed the door.
I don't want people seeing me or watching the activities that I'm doing inside my space.
So we've got security.
Safety and privacy are the three things that we want to protect when we have these doors to separate spaces.
And you can imagine that if people don't know how to open the door, that's going to create a lot of problems.
So if you're designing things, make sure people know how to use them and they don't have to get a manual to do something silly like open a door."