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Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

Warning: this book leaves some permanent imprints in your mind that will forever cause you to be annoyed at badly designed doors and other things.

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True that. I deal with this by applying the Robustness principle [1] where possible: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." In other words, be forgiving of bad design while setting a high standard for what I do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

I'm not sure this is the intent of the robustness principle. I think being 'robust' against bad design would have more to do with the design itself - not your opinion of the designer.

The book makes you question the sanity of a world that even gets the design of doors wrong.

A "Norman door" is a poorly designed door that confuses or fails to give you an idea whether to push, pull or slide. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...

A couple of years ago at a very nice wine bar in Berlin I accidentally pulled a sliding door completely off its tracks due to it being impossible to work out how it was meant to open - it had a handle that I assumed you pulled on.

Luckily, I wasn't the first (or probably last) person to make that error.

Does that concept have a name now? That reminds me of this Japanese comedy sketch about doors: https://youtu.be/nq-2USGVoEE

The name of the concept is based on the name of the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", Don Norman. This kind of door is what spurred him to write the book, or so it's argued!

It's a constant frustration when I go into someone's kitchen that they obviously spent thousands on, and I see a hob with up/down buttons, or a stylish but absurdly unusable sink faucet.

Faucets? You said FAUCETS? As a hotel hopper (in recess) I should have run a blog of crazy shower faucet designs, and I definitely wouldn't have run out of puzzling examples and nasty (cold or hot) surprises.

I swear every single hotel in the world is in a competition to make the most complicated, impossible to understand faucet. I'm sure if you understand how it works it somehow is more convenient (saves your temperature setting, perhaps) but it often takes me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to work.

One even had a "button" that you had to press to "unlock" the dial so you could turn it on, that one almost required a call to the desk.

In one hotel, I was stuck with cool showers, which were doable but rather unpleasant. On the last day, I discovered that the temp knob could be depressed which enabled it to be turned to hot. Ahh, finally, a hot shower!

I have a house here in London where in the kitchen the cold tap is on the left side and hot on the right side while in the bath rooms it is hot water on the right side and hot on the left side of the mixer tap. Seriously I have no idea why the developer thought this was a good idea.

At least once a week I get surprised by the hot water when washing my hands :)

This was likely a screw up by the plumber when connecting the fixture. Likely not hard to correct.

Absolutely not. Atleast not with everything all the time. I love how the front camera on my phone is not concentric to the notch. How my table has uneven legs (I place a wooden piece to adjust). How the edge of my door is not aligned with the frame. How some of my t-shirts have slightly uneven sleeves.

For me, imperfections make them personal. I am repelled by people ('designers' ;)) looking at everything to find faults and point them out with pride. Tells me they never made a thing with bare hands all their life.

There's a difference between personal/hand-made/imperfect and awkward/inefficient/poor design.

You are taking the irregularities of t-shirt sleeves in the same way that one interprets the imperfections that result from the hand-making of bespoke clothing, for example, the seams of tailored suits. The latter is craftsmanship; the former is inferior mass production. Not the same.

How they are made is not something I really want to get into. It was more about how some of us look at fault in everything and call it design thinking. I understand that it is frustrating when a product is an outright abomination in terms of design. But not everything needs to be 'designed' to the T. Be it mass production or craftsmanship. Not to mention, there is always added cost involved in the superior 'design' that people talk about.

As people have commented defects aren’t desirable, but what I think your feelings are leading you toward is Wabi-sabi (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi). There is no such thing as perfection and if there was it’s undesirable.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

> badly designed doors

The lesson I took away is to delete the door if you can figure out how to get the customer to agree.

Yes. It does :) But it also leaves you with a sense of why such things happen. Having such understanding helps to counter those "nefarious forces" when you're part of a product design effort.

definitely: handles on push doors

This and How Buildings Learn.

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