I’d like to see more design criticism on the level of functionality – i.e., the criticism of stuff that’s poorly designed. There’s a lot of kludgy design around, whether it’s the size of bathrooms in airplanes or my idiotic Italian toaster (I’m living in Rome), which forces you to use those little wire baskets to toast bread in; the baskets are forever becoming entangled with the bits of metal inside the slots that heat up the toast. (Plus, if someone accidentally sets down a magazine on top of the toaster when the wire baskets are in the slots, the weight of the magazine pushes the baskets down, and that turns on the heat, and before you know it you’ve got a fire – but don’t know it until it’s too late because no one in Italy seems to have smoke detectors in their apartments.) And Paola perhaps you can explain why Italian washing machines take two hours to do a load that an American machine would handle in twenty five minutes? Can Italians’ clothes really be that much cleaner? Is this the Slow Food movement applied to clothes?
I like Donald Norman’s writing about design. He has made a lot of good points over the years about designs that are needlessly complex and counterintuitive. (For example, why do doors that require you to Push them have handles that suggest Pull?) I suppose what I like about his design criticism is that it includes more of a psychological and less of an aesthetic approach.