The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are.

by Henry Petroski

  Plastic trash bags that were ostensibly designed to improve the quality of our lives have thus altered our behavior and environment. The malodorous and unsanitary conditions of their disposal aside, the bags themselves seem to be a blight on the overwhelming majority of places, private and public alike. In order to hold their shape and contents, they are folded over the sides of the waste basket or trash can, and it does not seem possible to do this in an aesthetically pleasing way. The bags are often much larger than the receptacle, so that they may be gathered and closed for disposal, but the extra plastic must then be bunched up or extended halfway down the side of the container, curiously reminiscent of the way some old women used to roll their stockings halfway down their legs. Whether the bag is bunched or rolled, however, a waste basket designed to harmonize with a neat and businesslike office or courtroom decor, or a trash can designed to be as unobtrusive as possible in a garden or a tree-lined path, ends up looking like nothing more attractive than some packaging only half removed. By force of quickly developed habit, it seems that virtually every trash receptacle is now lined with a plastic bag, whether necessary or not. In a library that I frequent where food and drink are strictly forbidden, all the waste baskets are overflowing with filmy plastic bags into which nothing but paper is ever likely to be dropped. If ever there was a pervasive design success turned failure, it is the plastic bag, now poised for an evolutionary improvement.

  The design of everything from fast-food packaging to litter containers must look beyond immediate use. Each artifact introduced into the universe of people and things alters the behavior of both. Whether the alteration be malevolent or benign is not always evident at the outset, but its impact certainly can be better anticipated if designers look down the design road and well beyond their immediate objectives. Though the best designs deal successfully with the future, that does not mean they are futuristic. All too often, the uncritical adoption of new materials or devices to solve old or imagined problems can create newer and more complex problems in an altered environment. The look of the future has so frequently become the blight of the present that it behooves designers to look more carefully and thoughtfully beyond appearances and short-term goals to the substance of designs and their long-term consequences. The analogy with business is that one must look beyond the quarterly bottom line and think in terms of the company history that will one day be written.

  14

  Always Room for Improvement

  In a column entitled “March of the Engineers,” the humorist and social critic Russell Baker lamented the complexity and sophistication of his office’s new telephone system. Not only did everyone have to attend classes for instruction in how to use it, but such features as call forwarding seemed to Baker to be taking technology too far: he wanted to be able to travel to distant places and not have his telephone calls follow him around the world. Baker closed his column by defining the new telephone system as “another bleak example of the horrors created when engineers refuse to leave well enough alone.”

  Every technological change has the potential for being both cursed and praised. What seems “well enough” to one critic may seem vastly deficient to another, and the roles of the critics may reverse from time to time, from situation to situation, even in the same individual. In the case of call forwarding, for example, another reporter might find it a wonderful feature were he trying to track down someone to confirm a detail in a story whose deadline was fast approaching.

  Russell Baker is not the only observer of late-twentieth-century technology who has lamented a new telephone system. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman wrote that “new telephone systems have proven to be another excellent example of incomprehensible design.” Indeed, elaborate push-button telephone systems provide a virtual paradigm for Norman’s inquiry into modern devices that “add to the stresses of life rather than reduce them.” He could “count upon finding a particularly bad example” of a system wherever he traveled, and many of the anecdotes he relates ring true to anyone who has gone through the trauma of adapting to a new instrument on the desk.

  Our school recently got its own sophisticated new telephone system, and many of my first reactions were similar to Baker’s and Norman’s. I resented losing my familiar old black rotary-dial instrument, with its single row of extension and intercom buttons whose code I had grown to understand. In time, however, I also remembered the frustrations when I first had to deal with that piece of nostalgia, and then I considered some of its failings that the new system corrected. The old black phone had been connected with dozens of like phones through but three outside lines, and only one of them had long-distance capability. When I wanted to make a phone call, I frequently had to wait for one of the lighted buttons to go off and hope I could lift the receiver to get a dial tone before one of my colleagues did. If I were to misdial what then seemed to be endless digits, or if I got a busy signal, I risked losing my line to another. Since the new telephones have been installed, I have never had to wait for a line, and I have learned the convenience of such features as automatic redialing, in which I need only push a single button to have a long string of digits repeated, or automatic callback, in which I need only push another button to have my phone ring when the line that was busy is free.

  As for call forwarding, my phone has that also, but I have yet to use it to forward my calls to the beach in August. Rather, I have employed it to send calls to our department secretary so that she may take messages or handle business when I cannot or do not wish to answer my phone. My new phone also has a voice-mail feature, which at the press of a button stops my phone from ringing and at the same time activates an answering system that records messages I can listen to and respond to at my convenience. Baker’s new phone may have even more features, and he is free to use or ignore as many as he wishes. From my point of view, the engineers have made well enough better and given me the choice of taking it or leaving it.

  I will admit that the new phone was somewhat intimidating at first. Its buttons were unfamiliar, and the options seemed overwhelming. I also resented having to stand with a crowd of my colleagues around a telephone representative going too quickly over features and using jargon she was too familiar with and we were generally too proud to ask about. I suspect that not a few of my colleagues eventually learned to work their telephones feature by feature, as did I, by spending hours in the privacy of their offices poring over the always confusing and often contradictory instruction manual. When any of us mastered some esoteric new feature, he would allude to it in lunchtime conversation, finding it gratifying when he turned out to be the first to make use of that item; correspondingly, each of us feared the embarrassment of learning that he was the only one still stymied by some other arcane detail.

  Ambivalent feelings toward evolving technology are nothing new. I recall that when push-button telephones were first introduced I scoffed at them. Thinking, naïvely, that the single purpose of push buttons was to enable one to complete phone calls faster, I ridiculed anyone who did not have the time to turn the rotary mechanical dial through seven digits to call home. But those were my salad days, when time seemed to move more slowly and telephone numbers were much shorter. I was then still in awe of the simple fact that I could dial a bunch of numbers and cause a telephone in another state to ring. My finger became accustomed to the unnatural but not unpleasant motion of dialing, at least before arthritis cramped my style, and I wondered who would need to dial a telephone in any other way or any more quickly. But now, having touched a push-button telephone, I find it difficult and sometimes downright annoying to have to turn the rotary dial on some of our telephones at home. It seems to take an eternity for the dial to return to my waiting finger after I have cranked a “9” through more than 270 degrees.

  Why do what prove in retrospect to be such obvious technological advantages put some of us off at first? It seems in part to be a matter of familiarity’s breeding content, at least when it comes to inanimate artifacts who
se form our hands have often grown to glove. The appearance of a new form, possibly accompanied by new functions, is intrusive and threatening. After all, a technological artifact like the old black rotary-dial telephone had been raised to the status of a cultural icon. Without thinking, we could use it and watch it being used. It had long ceased to be conspicuous, but let a movie actor dial a phone number with only six digits, his finger in the same hole for all, and the verisimilitude of a whole scene could be jeopardized—unless, of course, his blunder had meaning in the plot. The introduction of the push-button phone seemed to end all of that, and it took some of us quite a while to acknowledge that it had given us something in return. The electronic tones that accompany pushed buttons have become as familiar as the ratcheting advance and clicking return of the old rotary dial, and sometimes they sound like snatches of favorite songs. I have come to find some pleasure in being able to push the buttons in a staccato fashion, and the faster the more satisfying. Telephone numbers have come to take on a visual quality, and I can remember some only by the distinct pattern my finger hopscotches out on the keypad. My automated teller machine access code has a predominately horizontal pattern, and my voice-mail retrieval code has a vertical one; without these visual and physical mnemonics I would have a hard time getting cash or phone messages out of the machines.

  The newest telephone systems do not work perfectly, of course, but what does? The evolution of artifacts and their enabling infrastructures—hardware and software, in computer talk—does generally proceed along a route whose milestones read “good,” “better,” “best,” but this last so often appears really to be just over the next hill, as elusive as Shangri-La. The way itself is seldom without its detours, layovers, wrong turns, retracings, and accidents. Especially when the technology is complicated and its goals are ambitious, the road to totally satisfactory performance and acceptance is frequently littered with doubt and second-guessing, with wrecks and breakdowns. At first, neither the designers nor the users of a new technology may fully understand it, and so its progress is impeded and it can cause terrible traffic jams.

  Some of the frustrations that Baker has articulated for the telephone have been echoed recently for a host of electronic devices. An editorial in the trade magazine Design News discussed some of the editor’s irritations with consumer products that it seemed reasonable to expect to be better designed. The editorial “struck a chord” for many of the magazine’s readers, who are virtually all designers or engineers themselves, and they responded with their own lists of “aggravating products.” Packaging was mentioned by many respondents, who found it to be “too efficient” and “impenetrable.” This is a problem as old as nature, of course, as exemplified in the predator tearing at the captured prey, or in the native islander wrestling with a fallen coconut. We have seen that the tin can existed long before an effective can opener, and getting at the product behind much plastic packaging today can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience for an extraordinary number of otherwise adept adults, as is demonstrated on airline flight after airline flight of passengers trying to open their complimentary bags of peanuts. There is really no excuse for designers to make packages so secure that they cause consumers even to remark about them.

  Controls on electronic equipment are also a kind of packaging, for unless we can master them we cannot use the product inside the black box. Among Design News readers, “the myriad of setting techniques for digital clocks, watches and VCRs” was the “most universal complaint.” This is certainly understandable; who has not fumbled by trial and error and jumped through hoops of wires and cords to get some new electronic device to perform its tricks? My own experience has been that, when I master a few moves to get the new clock to keep time or the VCR to record and play, I do very little further exploring of the controls. Thus, I effectively never fully open the package that contains additional features.

  In spite of our frustrations with and incomplete mastery of electronic equipment, we have bought it in droves. By 1990 three-quarters of all American homes had microwave ovens and more than 60 percent had video-cassette recorders. Those who do not own such things are the object, if not of ridicule, at least of advertising campaigns, and in these even the electronics companies can acknowledge the problems of their imperfectly evolved products. One company, Goldstar Electronics, on launching a campaign that stressed the “user friendlier” nature of its products, admitted that “the perception among most consumers is that the sophisticated electronic products on the market are difficult, if not impossible, to use,” and they wanted to convey the impression that theirs were “designed with real people in mind.” In an ironic development for an industry that seems to come up with increasingly complex products, Goldstar wished to differentiate its products from those of its better-known competitors by touting them as “less sophisticated gadgets” that were easier to use.

  The basic function of consumer electronic devices, including all of their special features, has seldom been in doubt. A digital watch is intended to tell time and date, to sound alarms, and so forth. A VCR is to record programs and play video tapes, and to provide us with the ability to record one television show while watching another, or to record a show while dining out. Such objectives were clearly incorporated into the design problems out of which evolved the artifactual solutions now on catalogue pages and store shelves. The variety on display there, especially in the configuration of dials and controls, is but further evidence negating the notion that form follows function. Indeed, as we have seen repeatedly, it is precisely the failure of these things to perform as perfectly as someone can imagine that will cause them to evolve through their failures toward “perfection.” That is an ironically relative objective, of course, because in the meantime we users are adapting to the imperfections of the existing devices. A thing can never be separated from its users, even in its evolution.

  Why designers do not get things right the first time may be more understandable than excusable. Whether electronics designers pay less attention to how their devices will be operated, or whether their familiarity with the electronic guts of their own little monsters hardens them against these monsters’ facial expressions, there is a consensus among consumers and reflective critics like Donald Norman, who has characterized “usable design” as the “next competitive frontier,” that things seldom live up to their promise. Norman states flatly, “Warning labels and large instruction manuals are signs of failures, attempts to patch up problems that should have been avoided by proper design in the first place.” He is correct, of course, but how is it that designers have, almost to a person, been so myopic?

  Given the problem of designing anything, from paper clip to microwave oven to suspension bridge, the first objective clearly has to be to get the thing to perform its primary function, whether that be to hold papers together, to cook food, or to span a river. Naturally, designers will concentrate on these things first, and in the process of doing so will become familiar with their designs in ways that few other individuals will ever need to or probably want to be. The original designers of paper clips, for example, will know the ways of the wire they bend first in their minds and then on paper and then in machines. They will learn how some wire cracks when bent into too tight a curve, and how other wire does not lose its spring enough to be formed. In time they will bend the right wire in the right configuration to meet their self-imposed if often ill-defined goals, but more likely they will end up with a bunch of wires in a bunch of configurations, as demonstrated in patent after patent, and as allowed for in claim after claim, each manifestation of which has advantages and disadvantages relative to the others. Out of these, they and their entrepreneurial, manufacturing, and marketing partners in design will select something to make and sell. Though the objective of how the end product will be used is never far from consciousness, those who are involved throughout the design process necessarily become so familiar and friendly with the object of their conception that they can operate it with
an ease and care that the uninitiated may never know. An act as seemingly simple as attaching a new-style paper clip to a pile of papers will always be easier for the clip’s designer than for the first-time user.

  Even if a special effort is made to give a new product over to a human-factors engineer, whose task it is to suggest modifications to make the product user-friendly, the result will only be as successful as the process is complete in anticipating how the product will fail to function. If the engineers tacitly assume that all users will be right-handed, for example, the product may have no chance of being user-friendly for 10 percent of the population. Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.

  Whether acceptance or rejection is the fate of some new artifact or technological system, the evolutionary process is universally one of relatives and comparatives. Whereas Russell Baker may have cursed the engineers for not leaving well enough alone, what constitutes well enough depends—as it always has. From a certain point of view, prehistoric life was all well and good enough for prehistoric man and woman. Indeed, the artifacts and technology then in existence played a large part in defining the nature of the era. By definition, prehistoric tools and ways were (perfectly?) adequate for getting along in the prehistoric world. The argument that technological advances were necessary to advance civilization is at best a tautology and at worst akin to the myth that necessity is the mother of invention.

  What ultimately mandates the fact of technological evolution may be as fundamentally ineffable as what mandates the fact of natural evolution. That is not to say that there is not some dynamic at work but, rather, to suggest that a kind of evolutionary process is inextricably involved with the processes of life and living. Technology and its ancillary artifacts are concomitants to human existence, and it behooves us to understand their nature as well as our own, flawed and imperfect as they necessarily may be. That understanding is most accessible at the microcosmic and microtemporal level, where one thing follows from another as a child from its parent, and the understanding is most acute when it resolves the dilemma of the famous and the obscure, the great and the small, the accepted and the rejected, by explaining their genesis equally while at the same time explaining their divergence of achievement within a common context.