Hacker News Reader

Comment by wingerlang | Hacker News Reader

> The Camden Bench is virtually impossible to sleep on. It is anti-dealer and anti-litter because it features no slots or crevices in which to stash drugs or into which trash could slip. It is anti-theft because the recesses near the ground allow people to store bags behind their legs and away from would be criminals. It is anti-skateboard because the edges on the bench fluctuate in height to make grinding difficult. It is anti-graffiti because it has a special coating to repel paint.

It's a bench for sitting on, I don't understand how anyone gave this a second thought.

And are they treating the anti-skate/anti-graffiti as negatives? Why would the city not want to protect their property and make keep the tear to a minimum.

View on HN

Consider it this way. The Camden Bench has a clear dictum - thou shalt only sit. It's pretty clear that this object has been placed by a rigid authority with strong opinions on the right and wrong way to use their bench.

A "standard" bench is more neutral - here is a bench. Do with it what you like. The user is invited to exercise their own preferences in how to use it. It acknowledges that the user may have their own valid ideas about how to use it. Consequently, the user feels more respected.

It's like using a locked-down phone vs one where the user is free to install their own firmware. The former may be adequate for many and more straightforward to use, but it may not serve all users and many would bristle just at the suggestion that they are being limited in what they can do.

"It's pretty clear that this object has been placed by a rigid authority with strong opinions on the right and wrong way to use their bench."

Should benches even be fixed in place? That is an expression of authority also. What if we were to built it out of modular components, and place it, without it being bolted in place? There would be problems from doing this. Are some of the same problems true of the multi-use bench you describe?

There are problems with your analogy to phones. Phones are private property. The benches in this thread are public property. We could quibble about what those terms mean, but it's clear that they are affected by different priorities and dynamics.

It's a rough analogy, I admit. But the meaning of "public" vs "private", that's one of the central issues here. What rights does a random person have over an object in the public space? They don't own it, but somehow they should have some say. Maybe that's a bad question; this is not just about legal rights. Does the object suggest a sense of partnership, of shared ownership, of community? If I feel engaged in my city, I'll respect it, I'll take care of it, I'll help it develop. If not, I won't bother. Maybe it'll get littered, broken, tagged. Design plays a role here in forming that impression.

I'm interested in this idea: can we imagine a world where people are so engaged that individuals just take care of problems like graffiti without there needing to be a council for it. What would it take to produce that spirit between people?

For there to be a bench, and for its use to not be defined, and for people to use it as it is marked.

> If not, I won't bother

Often there are communities who feel differently. The people who are invested in the community will maintain it. Outsiders will respect it less. Some will take it for granted, others will actively undermine it for the lulz. These groups live alongside one another, and share resources, but they are socialised differently.

Sometimes, though, things stick. In Australia, people leave their things on the beach when they go swimming. Messing with people's stuff seems to be a universal taboo. There'll be weird individuals who break it, but no subculture.

It's a bench for sitting on, I don't understand how anyone gave this a second thought.

It's almost a copy-paste of the brochure: https://web.archive.org/web/20140903121925/http://www.factor...

The bench was specifically designed to have those "features", it's not an incidental property.

My question is why people are upset about it, why are you quoting features?

It is a bench - for sitting on. Not for sleeping, skating, dealing drugs, littering on or spraying graffiti. So why is it bad that it deters those things?

> It is a bench - for sitting on.

That's presumably the original intent behind it.

But humans are an innovative bunch, so they start using things for all sorts of purposes that they were not originally designed for.

Some of these uses are deemed, whether everyone agrees with that or not, to be bad. Sometimes clearly so, sometimes less.

Should it be bad that a homeless has a relatively comfortable space to sleep ? Maybe if that happens too much, other people can't use the benches any more.

If a bench is unoccupied it makes for a good skaterail. It's already outside and presumably dirty, so where's the harm ? But maybe some people will be deterred to sit if it's always being skated on.

Maybe the graffiti makes the bench look lot's better ? But then that's subjective.

Drug dealing is bad. But I can remember at least one occasion where I was able to lean a heavy thing I was carrying on the bench and prevent it from falling over, by temporarily strapping it to a crease in the bench I was sitting on. Presumably like one of those that are used to hide small drug stashes.

I don't think it's as clear cut, as you make it out to be. And I agree, that it makes sense to forbid, let's say skating and graffiti on benches that people want to sit on.

I just think that even a simple thing as a bench in a public place can be more than just a bench just by virtue of the amount of creative minds that pass by it each day. And dealing with this creativity by just forbidding it, or designing certain use cases out of it makes for dull society.

If the definition of "dull society" is specifically restricted to the absence of:

* Homeless sleeping on public benches

* Surprise drug stashes in public benches

* Skate grease slathered on public benches

* Organized crime organizations tagging public benches as their territory

Then yes, I agree, what a dull society the Camden bench creates.

I guess because in skewing the design to prevent those things, it makes it less good at actually being a bench. It's less comfortable, you can't lean back on it and it's extremely ugly.

Whether that's a worthwhile trade-off or not is another question, but it is a trade-off.

I'm not sure that most people would be particularly offended by the fact that it reduces drug dealing, theft, littering etc.

The problem, at least for me, is the sleeping bit. I would much rather that people didn't have to sleep out in the streets and if that issue were properly tackled then I doubt many people would be complaining about the benches/spikes etc. But then, we probably wouldn't need anti-sleep benches if the homelessness problem didn't exist.

But as long as that does exist, making public environments hostile to desperate people just looking for somewhere, anywhere, to sleep for the night seems like entirely the wrong answer. It's not solving the problem - it's just moving it to somewhere presumably less pleasant than that bench could have been.

Because a public bench should also be for sleeping and skating.

...since when?

Since always. Public property should be usable by the public in any way they see fit, as long as they don't damage it.

You do realise that skateboarding on benches means people are slamming metal against the thing with a, probably, 40-80 kilo human being on top of it? It is really damaging.

I used to skate myself and I am not against it, but it is definitely damaging.

You could argue that public property should be usable by the public in any legal way as they see fit; however, city ordnances often do prohibit sleeping in public places, so using a bench for sleeping is not a permitted use no matter how it's designed.

You could, be it would be silly.

http://cdn3.spiegel.de/images/image-594952-galleryV9-gbyt-59...

You're confusing the legal with the moral.

There's also a big confusion in the discussion with "ordinance" vs "zoning"

There are parks near my house you can sleep/camp in, and others you can't. There are parks you can skate in, complete with some cool government built and maintained structures, and there are parks you can't skate in.

Zoning differs in every municipality in the world but locally there's zoning codes for neighborhood park, resort/campground park, and formal gardens type park.

Arguing some homeless dude has to be supported to sleep and live in a neighborhood park is exactly like demanding I should be able to build a leather tannery or chromium plating operation in my backyard, because I want to and who cares who it bothers.

> Arguing some homeless dude has to be supported to sleep and live in a neighborhood park

"Some homeless dude" would in my case be my own sister if my country were as anti-social as some other countries.

If "we make structures to keep homeless out of sight of the 'normal populace'" applies to your country, then your country is already in the moral wrong for not supporting your homeless by providing them with dignified housing.

There is no excuse you can make for compounding on that that won't make it even more morally wrong.

I don't like the anti-social ordinances any more than the anti-social benches they caused.

The words are negative ("anti-", "hostile", etc.), and that seems gives the article a slight bias against these things, but overall it seems to be mostly trying to call attention to these things. For example, the concluding remarks:

> 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.

> The reason we need a critical theory of unpleasant design is so we can recognize the coercion that is taking place in our public spaces. We need to know when we are replacing human interaction, nuance and empathy with hard, physical and non-negotiable solutions.

> Whether you think a certain form of design is exclusionary but serves a greater good, or believe it is just hostile and offensive, it is important to be aware of the decisions that are being made for you. Designs that are unpleasant to some are put into place to make things more pleasant for others, and that latter category might just include you.

They mostly seem to be against the public being coerced unknowingly. For example, many people might think the purpose of segmenting a bench with arm rests is for the seater's convenience/comfort, or that 'leaning benches' are just a way to save on materials cost. Regardless of whether public opinion agrees or disagrees with the main reasons for these trends (e.g. anti-sleeping), we can't know what that opinion is until these reasons are commonly known.

> overall it seems to be mostly trying to call attention to these things.

Thanks for pointing this out. For me, items like the Camden bench immediately stood out as having that coercive element, so I assumed the article had an axe to grind against them by focusing on their negative effects.

It seems that these kinds of coercive design elements are not equally transparent to everyone. In that light, the article would definitely enlightening to the unaware.

The issue I took away from the article is that the bench's unique design actually inhibits its primary function: sitting. The slanted seats make for poor resting areas and require a sizable open space for installation. Not to mention it causes people to sit in opposite directions from each other, making typical conversations near impossible. The other features like anti-(skate|graffiti) are interesting, but designing for a particular aim always requires tradeoffs. In this case, I'm not sure it's really worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com