Ill-Designed for the Purpose

The Art of Making Things Awkward

'A game in which a small ball is hit into an even smaller hole, using tools ill-designed for the purpose.' (This insight is variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson or Lord Curzon). But what do we mean by 'ill-designed'? Two quite different criteria - form and function - should not be confused. The golf club looks unwieldy and awkward; this is true. At gut level, the mind sees this tool's geometry as, let's face it, a little bit silly. Not so much ugly, as silly. With croquet, now there's a sensibly designed propulsion: a mallet. Then there's tennis: a wire trampoline, in effect. The golf club by comparison is just plain daft. The golf club may, on the other hand, be ideally designed for its purpose. I suspect a trade-off here. The golf club must neither be too effective, nor hopelessly ineffective. The skill must take, say, ten thousand hours to acquire. In the distant past, this evaluation happened empirically. Today, given the amount of money involved, golf clubs are probably designed by computational fluid dynamics and partial differential equations. It is for this reason understandable that, by regulation, golf clubs must not depart too far from their traditional design; lest tournaments are won by scientists rather than golfers.

With the alphabet, we organise it by ABCDEF, yet type it by QWERTY. We owe QWERTY to the first typewriters; but not to allow faster typing. Received wisdom, is that QWERTY slowed things down. On early typewriters the bars had a tendency to jam, if proximate keys were pressed too rapidly. This does not explain, however, why the fourth-commonest pairing in English, 'er', is part of QWERTY. Whatever the reason, we are now stuck with QWERTY. On computers we peck with our forefingers; on smartphones we flick with our thumbs. But ABCDEF has never caught on.

An anomalous design is evident in cutlery, namely the knife. While chewing or talking, we now and then rest the knife on the plate's edge; at which it promptly up-ends itself, and clatters clumsily onto the table. Next time we are wary and place the knife further onto the plate; but it slides down: and the handle ends up in the gravy. We repeat these balancing attempts: it clatters; it slides; it clatters then slides. The solution, we finally realise, is to cement the knife in place by shoving the blade into some mashed potato. This is the problem with all-metal knives: the weight is in the handle, when it should be in the blade. That is to say, the centre of gravity is in the wrong place. It could be remedied by a slenderer handle, of course. The best solution, however, is the non-metal handle. The blade tapers to a rod, which enters the handle through a hole. These 'bone-handle' knives are still available, but I've never seen them in public restaurants. I bought myself a set of plastic-handled cutlery, but they were of limited use. To cut my food, I must place my forefinger on the back of the blade, not the handle, otherwise the plastic fractures.

Why are plates round? The problem is immediately apparent, if eating at a desk. Two arms, the keyboard and the desk's edge, demark an area useful for food. Is this area round? No. It is rectangular. Moreover, an average plate is over-sized. To eat sandwiches from an average plate, I must push the keyboard further away, and then extend my arms awkwardly. The solution is the rectangular plate, of which I now own several. High-street stores seldom stock them, but counter-cultural purveyors lurk in cyberspace.

Round plates being the orthodoxy, this leads to another anomaly: the superabundance of rectangular trays. This combination is a geometrical stupidity. If we were logical, rational beings, we'd use rectangular trays for rectangular plates. We need not, indeed, dispense food onto a plate, then put the plate onto a tray. Why not make the plate a tray? Well, these plates already exist: they are used by the military, and also in some refectories. But for some reason they are eschewed in domestic settings.

A certain unhappily designed teapot is ubiquitous; it is much favoured by motorway service stations. I refer to the stump-spouted aberration, which dispenses tea equally between cup and table. In short, a furious torrent of dribbles. Now I am reasonably certain that, given sufficient practice, ten thousand hours say, it would be possible to acquire sufficient dispensing skill, and so allow only a handful of fugitive dribbles. As it happens, a nondribbling teapot might not be feasible: physicists still argue over a cuppa about it. Leastways, an extended rather than stumped spout is advisable. I own one of these; but a brown monorail nevertheless decorates the spout's underside.

The cup-and-saucer is ill-designed. Originally a small quantity of tea was decanted so that it would first cool, before being imbibed from the saucer. While this practice is admittedly kept up in some places, it is nowadays judged uncouth in others. But is the saucer a suitable receptacle for the teaspoon? I think not. The cup holds the spoon in place. Lift the cup, and gravity takes effect. There are, also, those cups seemingly designed for dolls, since the human finger will not pass through the eye of the handle. The biggest problem, though, is stability. The additional degree of movement between cup and saucer, invites a slopping incident. Sensible people use a mug.

The bathroom furnishes a further lesson in the art of making things awkward: I refer to sinks, which, at one time, were sufficiently deep to contain rebounding droplets as water struck the basin. No more. The stupidest competition is now underway for the shallowest sink. Turn on the tap, water strikes the basin, and fugitive droplets now escape in all directions, falling and puddling further afield. And to fill a bottle of water, one must hold it almost horizontal under the tap. This problem is compounded by those taps for which there are two settings: 'off', or 'wide-open throttle'. There is I suppose a natural limit to this trend, insofar as human hands must still get between tap and sink.

Let us return to desks: I wonder if those furniture designers are rather stupid. I refer not to old-fashioned desks, on either side of which there are drawers, and between which your legs rest in a sort of tunnel. I mean the modern, much-debased version, for which a cross-wise tie-beam provides structural support. Although ideal for Snow White's assistants, they are a tad vexatious to the chins, if your height begins with the number six. You spend half your time at your QWERTY, and half your time cursing the tie beam. The solution, is to support the desk by four legs, one at each corner, rather than a tie-beam. In fact we already have such a desk: it is called a 'table'. If I want a desk I must buy a table, rather than a desk.

With tables, the concept of 'stability' has been jettisoned. In public houses, three-legged tables were once common, and for a good reason: floors were crudely constructed. But even well-constructed floors suffer from undulations. Now on a carpeted floor this matters not; but on linoleum or tiled floors, it does. We have all slopped our coffee at some time, just because we rested our elbows; and we have all shimmed a table leg with a paper napkin, to find this measure sufficient. The practical solution, is the three-legged table.

The table with a centre-mounted support should be particularity shunned, and for two reasons. First, the support is where you want your legs; and the plinth is where you want your feet. Our knees knock into the support, and our feet must sit on a hassock. The second and greater problem, however, is that a centre-mounted table cannot be made rigid: a slopped coffee is inevitable. 

(c) cufwulf

cufwulf@aol.com