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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

This isn't necessarily bad, and there are plenty of innocuous unpleasant designs: doors with locks, fences, car alarms, even those faucets in airport bathrooms you have to keep pushing to keep them from turning off. Sometimes you need to make something less friendly in order to prevent certain unwanted uses.

The important thing to remember is that you aren't fooling anyone. It's quite clear what your unpleasant design is designed to prevent, and the design itself serves as a constant reminder of the problem it was designed to solve. Locks remind you of burglary, airport bathroom faucets remind you that people often leave the water running, and spiky windowsills remind you of homelessness almost as much as actual homeless people do. This may not be the kind of feeling you want to build into your city!

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These kinds of designs and your point remind me of MIT's decision to install heavy-gauge "security" screens on all upper-story windows of my dormitory, in response to an incident where an underclassman ended his life by deliberately exiting one.

They were godawful ugly, but worse, a constant reminder that we nominal adults (and supposedly quite bright, promising ones at that) simply weren't to be trusted not to do ourselves great harm at any moment. Certainly you could argue they served a useful purpose, but I always thought they were deeply dehumanizing.

'Modern' buildings solve this problem with windows that are either too small to climb through (such as the narrow crank windows) or with windows that do not open at all.

The difference between design which prevents suicide and design which prevents sleeping is that suicide can be prevented with unpleasant design. Homelessness is not solved with unpleasant design. Of course the underlying problem behind suicidal tendencies is not solved, however suicide could be called an unnatural desire. Sleeping is a near universal human necessity, and denying someone the ability to sleep is intrinsically dehumanizing.

I think the point about how dehumanizing unpleasant design is. I spent the night in a train station waiting for a connecting train at 6 AM the next morning. I can sleep through almost anything, and I had one of the worst nights of sleep I've ever had in my life. It was specifically designed to present almost no place to sleep. Not only did every bench have the arm rests which prevented lying down, any area of the floor that might be comfortable to lie in had a large concrete planter placed to make the area slightly too small to sleep in. Furthermore, every 15 minutes a loud recorded message indicating it was illegal to spend the night in the station unless you were waiting for a train or bus the next morning.

I once slept underneath a canoe during a thunderstorm after 45 mph straight line winds made it too dangerous to set up my tent. That was a much better night of sleep than I had in the train station.

I disagree with your assertion that suicide can be designed away whereas sleep cannot because it is a necessity.

Anybody who wants to commit suicide will do it if they are motivated enough. Putting bars outside a window, or preventing a window from opening are only preventing a specific type of suicide.

Similarly, preventing somebody from sleeping on a bench won't prevent them from sleeping. It will only prevent them from sleeping on the bench. They can sleep in front of or next to the bench, having the same "blocking" effect which prevents others from enjoying the use of the bench.

Some people theorize that suicides can be prevented by inconvenience, and perhaps some very marginal percentage can, but I agree with you. In general, those who jump from fourth floor windows are attempting something different than those who take half a bottle of sleeping pills. It is of course disconcerting to see the residue of suicide, so that might justify some efforts made to discourage suicides in particular locations, but only so long as those efforts don't render those locations less aesthetically suited to their purpose.

> This isn't necessarily bad, and there are plenty of innocuous unpleasant designs: doors with locks, fences, car alarms, even those faucets in airport bathrooms you have to keep pushing to keep them from turning off. Sometimes you need to make something less friendly in order to prevent certain unwanted uses.

I think the key difference here is that these things prevent burglary, trespassing, grand theft, and thousands of gallons of wasted water. The Camden bench just makes it so you don't have to see a homeless person. There's something distinctly dehumanizing about that, moreso than door locks.

The difference between locks/fences/car alarms and those benches is literally the difference between criminals and homeless people. All those designs are purposeful attempts at deterring a particular social group. The question to ask is when it's right to act this way.

Do you think is right to prevent homeless people from sleeping in your car or your home?

It is. But we're talking about preventing homeless from using public space to live.

I think we agree in that case that the difference with locks on doors is not literally the difference between criminals and homeless people.

> The important thing to remember is that you aren't fooling anyone. It's quite clear what your unpleasant design is designed to prevent, and the design itself serves as a constant reminder of the problem it was designed to solve.

Is that really true though? Things like spikes are clearly hostile add-ons; there is no reason for their existence other than preventing some behaviour, so nobody is fooled.

However, something like an arm rest on a bench may appear completely innocuous to the majority of people. The same goes for pink or blue lighting, and some of the "features" of the Camden Bench (e.g. no nooks to stash drugs) would probably go unnoticed if they weren't explicitly stated.

I suppose it's like having the mindset of a security researcher (e.g. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/smart_water.h... ); unless you're engaged in them yourself, it takes a certain kind of mind to figure out what behaviours would be possible if it weren't for these contrivances.

The "armrests" shown in the article appear too low or too sloped to be useful.

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