Design Sojourn

Over the weekend we went to a fairly up market restaurant for dinner. It was a nice little quaint setup with enthusiastic waiters and fantastic food. My rack of lamb was particularly delicious.

All in all it was a good meal, good company and a good night. However it will be unlikely that I will comeback to this restaurant again. The reason was that someone decided to leave the doors to the restaurant’s toilet wide open. As a result of this, the moment you walked into the restaurant, it smelled like a well-used public toilet.

You never realized how important something like “a smell” is to a restaurant until it’s gone, and in this case, gone bad. In other words you don’t really know what you are missing until its gone. Identifying such small but important details takes a lot of skill, making designing an experience a difficult task indeed.

From another angle, I can almost say that “good design” is one people don’t have a problem with because it covers every possible problem by the removal of such “pain points”. I always say people should complain about “good design” a lot more!

Unfortunately consumers today are savvy enough to take a lot of this for granted in your products. This makes our task as Industrial Designers a lot more challenging. So now you know the baseline you have to maintain. The real question is how do you design a product that can go beyond this and more?

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