Comment by gabemart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabemart | Hacker News Reader

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I see two main claims in the article:

* "Unpleasant design" is different because it aims to exert social control in public spaces

* "Unpleasant design" is different because it is intended to create a hostile atmosphere - it increases unpleasantness rather than pleasantness

I don't really agree with either claim.

All design of public spaces is intended to exert some form of social control. Creating a manicured park with flower beds, comfortable benches and beautiful splashing fountains is intended to exert social control by encouraging people to congregate and spend time in the park. In fact, any good designer attempts to exert control by encouraging certain behaviour patterns over other behaviour patterns.

"Unpleasant design" is not intended to increase unpleasantness. Some groups perceive people sleeping on benches or congregating ("loitering") as unpleasant, just as other groups find preventing people from sleeping on benches or congregating to be unpleasant.

I'm not defending the particular examples of design referenced in the article. I'm not saying it's a great idea to make benches you can't lie down on. But I don't agree it makes sense as a distinct category of design. It's just design that tends to favour groups higher in the socio-economic hierarchy at the expense of groups lower in the socio-economic hierarchy. This may be a very bad thing, but I don't think it's a different type of design.

"I don't think it's a different type of design."

For some reason whenever I see articles like this on design, I think of conway's law. See, broadly, design is a process of questioning and understanding. This process is limited by and maybe starts to metaphorically resemble the structure of the organisation which produces it.

This is for some reason much more apparent where there is a social/political aspect to the design, rather than being purely commercial. Maybe a better design for a toilet to prevent injecting.. is a safe injecting room. ie. The problem as identified by the client is not 'people shooting up unsafely', the problem is 'our voters don't like these people hanging around'. The blue light somehow exposes the cold blooded rationalism of a council wishing to satisfy its benefactors at the expense of its inhabitants.In fact, it is just as important that it also illustrates this point, as it is as much about symbolism as utility.

So I guess while I agree with you, I still think it is worth drawing attention to the unpleasant designs for unpleasant clients..

But that is the whole point - the "society" intentionally wants to exclude certain activities and people, and thus makes systems, laws and also physical items and environment to make that desire happen.

Blue light in e.g. macdonalds bathrooms is not actually intended to influence how people inject their drugs, it's intended to make so that the people who want to inject their drugs don't come there, to exclude them from their community. A safe injecting room would not solve that, I'd rather argue that the blue lights are a cheaper solution doing the same job as e.g. face control and bouncers throwing people out from some other types of estabilishments.

I guess what you are arguing is that the design is in many ways apathetic to pleasantness, and simply a utility to exert change in behaviour.

I agree, but I also feel like making that distinction aligns really well with the idea that they are dehumanizing.

The contraptions themselves are definitely designed to be unpleasant though. But the design choice to add them to the space is a more complicated discussion.

Right. The article has a point, but trying to extend it into a full category of design—and then calling it "unpleasant design"—feels more than a bit arbitrary. They just grouped together designs with goals they disliked and called them "unpleasant" under the guise of developing a "critical theory". When you define a category, with a name, you're heavily implying that the categorization you use is important and meaningful and natural, and it's not clear that it is here.

They're trying to sneak a particular moral point through as commentary on design—which, thinking about it, isn't all that different from the designs they criticize.

I'm not sure it's that important, but I would say there's a difference between preventing people from doing what they want and inviting people do to something. That said, I'm also not sure the article actually claims that difference.

> Whether handed down by the establishment or created in response to official interventions, there is always an aspect of coercion to design. Usability design, for instance, is used to get people to buy things and use their smartphones in certain ways, often without the user even being aware of it. Fundamentally, works of unpleasant design, hostile architecture and street furniture in general are no different.

I agree that the word "different" isn't the best word.

These are a physical equivalent of Dark Patterns (user interfaces designed to trick people).

Dark patterns attempt to trick the intended user. What is the trick being pulled on the intended user here?

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