Blaming the Designer

21 Sep Blaming the Designer

Posted at 07:39h in Problem Solving by Key Tech

If a product is not being used correctly, most often we blame the user. Hold a drill backwards, and you’ll likely get laughed out of the hardware store. Have trouble setting up a wireless network? You must be a clod – better get some help. But, how much of the blame comes to rest on the designers?

We all know that highway design affects congestion. Merge lanes cause traffic. Bends in the highway cause traffic. Sometimes, nothing at all can cause traffic. But while traffic congestion is frustrating and annoying, proper road design has also been shown to mitigate damage in accidents and save lives. Now, a Swedish initiative has shown that road and intersection designs significantly affect how cars, bicycles, and people are interacting with each other on our roads.

Mark Rosenberg wrote in a Boston Globe article about his encounter with a runner that was fatally hit by a car. In his search for answers, he came across a Swedish program call Vision Zero, a plan to effectively eradicate road traffic deaths. The evidence is impressive:

By replacing red lights with traffic circles or rotaries, fatal accidents at those intersections fell by 80% – 90%
By stretching mylar film between oncoming lanes, they were able to prevent head-on collisions and reduce the incidence of fatalities by 70% – 80%

As product designers, can we solve those problems our users are having? Can we eliminate the user manual altogether?

Now, how can we get road designers to solve our traffic epidemic so 40,000 people don’t have to die next year?

Photo credit: Colin Broug