Are You a Table-Mover?
I’m secretly obsessed with design in the real world. How chairs fit with the tables at a restaurant. How a fork manages the cheesecake when you cut through it and lift it towards your mouth - does the cake fall off the fork or fit perfectly? How a pen sits in your hand when you write. How public toilets construct the flow of people in and out of the toilet area. The music, the smell, the lighting of a retails store.
Everything is designed. Whether intentional or not, design is always present.
More than the design itself, I am intrigued by how people react to design. Reacting to good design is easy and obvious: You use the product as intended and don’t even notice the design.
Conversely there are two ways I see most people react to bad design in the real world, one is more prominent than the other:
- People believe that this is just the way the world is. They accept the bad design and continue on struggling through it. A quick example here is music in a restaurant. I often sit down and look around and notice how many people are shouting at each other from across the table because the music is so loud. They accept the music is loud and react accordingly by shouting.
- People refuse to blindly accept bad design and ask if it can change. There are those of us who react to bad design by pointing it out and trying to change it. I’m the guy who sits down, hears loud music, calls the manager over and politely asks her to turn the volume down so I can continue my conversation without shouting.
Watching Men in Black for the first time I was struck by the simplicity and brilliance of one scene in particular. I loved the entire film but this scene stuck in my mind and changed me forever.
Will Smith sits down to take the MIB test and has nothing to write on. The other genius types faff and fiddle. Smith gets up and loudly drags the table towards his seat and then has something to write on.
Here it is:
The message here is not subtle or new; Do you move the table when everyone else tries to comply? To me, at the time (1997), it was a revelation.
Why don’t more people adjust their environment and the rules to suit their needs?
Recently I read this article by Tristan Harris about how technology hijacks minds. The article basically suggests that very little in the world is our choice. That the menus we see are presented to us by people/companies that want to show us specific things. These menus are everywhere, in everything, all the time. The shop window, the menu, the car you drive, the device you’re using right now to read this article. The website you’re on, the menu I used to write this article. All menus presented to us by someone else.
What we should be asking about is the items not on the menu. What we should be doing is moving the table.
Menus are really just a set of rules. I know through experience that menus and rules are created to present the simplest (and often most profitable) options to the consumer. Often, the interpretation of simple is not universal.
- When a table is too far from a chair at a restaurant, what do you do? If the chair is bolted to the floor, do you pull the table towards yourself or leave it where it is and suffer for the entire meal?
- How do you approach the menu at a diner? Do you ask if they can make you something off the menu or only ever choose from what you are offered.
- When you go into a store, do you ask for a discount or just buy what they’re selling at the price they set?
- When you apply for job, do you immediately accept the offer or push back and negotiate?
The world is made up of rules that somebody else created. It’s hard to make it if you blindly abide by rules that were set by someone else decades ago (or recently for that matter).
The best way to make things work in your favour is to bend or entirely break the conventions around you.
Set new rules for yourself and then be the best at following those rules.