I'm adding this to my Netflix queue immediately -- cannot wait to see it.

The Design of Everyday Things is a really good book about this subject.

I read it a while ago, but one I remember is this: If you ever push to open a door only to find that you need to pull it, it's not your fault. The door was poorly designed.

The optimist says the glass is half full.

The pessimist says the glass is half empty.

The engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be for the application.

Stephanie,

here is a little movie I made with Gary about Helvetica…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ2ySs60hPI

Ive explains how an indicator light located on the front of a laptop should be completely invisible until whatever it's supposed to indicate actually happens. Until that light glows, you don't even want to know it's there; its invisibility is, to Ive, a thing of beauty.

I bought a new Sony Vaio laptop a month ago and it has a small amber light on the front edge that blinks non-stop. I can't decipher the icon, and there was no documentation included that explains what any light or peripheral slot is for and when I go to the Sony users manual site it says my computer doesn't exist.

For me, it doesn't matter how well this computer performs and lasts, this small and very annoying thing will be the reason that I don't buy another Vaio. Meanwhile I have placed a piece of black electrician's tape over the light.

The examples of clever design featured in this article are the reasons why technology runs us instead of us running technology.

Hidden indicator lights? Give me a break. Any human machine interface should be obvious and accessible. It should be a control panel in the literal sense, where each control feature is visible and understood by the user. The user should be in control, feel intuitively competent, the master of the machine. Hidden light are too clever by half, designed to an arbitrary standard of alienation. The "don't worry your pretty little head about it" standard.

This is why most modern designs are so frustrating, most users know, if only subconsciously, that everything important is hidden, that they do not really understand the system, and that they are confined, like rats in a maze, to a predetermine path, one that likely will not fulfill their needs or desires. This is why they constantly seek the next innovation, so they might at last, finally be in control.

Besides, the article is a bit disingenuous. Most products are designed for ease of manufacture, instead of the end user. Design is a money-making proposition, with the consumer only a vague afterthought. That is why most design is so bulky and filled with useless flashiness, to disguise its real purpose; to make the manufacturer rich. Most products project a basic contempt for the purchaser, leaving the user with the correct impression that the seller is laughing all the way to the bank.

"Open source" as found in the programming world, is the design standard that all engineers and designers should be following. The program, device, instrument, is a collaboration with the user, open to their understanding, and under their control. It allows feedback and interaction, elevating the user above the mere consumer, to an active participant in the design. This should be the ideal.

Hidden indicator lights? Give me a break. Any human machine interface should be obvious and accessible.

I've removed the tape and now revel in the interface.

It sounds as though Hustwit has picked up where Bachelard ( The Poetics of Space ) and Barthes (Mythologies and Camera Lucida) left off: in reality, the actualized design of an object depends as much on the end user's perception as it does on the designer's original intent.

In so doing, "Objectified" seems to drops us smack in the middle of a socioeconomic minefield bounded on one side by Virginia Postrel (The Substance of Style) and on the other side by Stewart Ewen (All Consuming Images). Design drives consumerism to a very large degree: it encourages us to covet the latest and greatest product iteration, even though the example we already own may well be perfectly adequate for our needs. This is great for the business world (at least during boom times and economic bubbles), but what about for the world outside of Wall Street: the blue planet itself and the living creatures that inhabit it?

Was Gordon ("Greed is Good") Gekko right? Moreover, was attempting to place an SUV in every American driveway a good design goal? Most importantly, has Man learned anything even remotely constructive from the profligate last sixty years?

Might we recall that the biblical Golden Calf was itself of an exquisite design?

"Hidden indicator lights? Give me a break. Any human machine interface should be obvious and accessible. It should be a control panel in the literal sense, where each control feature is visible and understood by the user. The user should be in control, feel intuitively competent, the master of the machine."

I agree completely. I have a sleek DVD recorder that has tiny gray buttons that are so small and faint that I have to shine a flashlight and magnifying glass on the controls in order to even find them. Most industrial designers are too left-brained. For us right-brained people, if something is hidden it's as if it doesn't exist and that sense of loss becomes a source of anxiety. And I have to relearn the the equally incomprehensible (yet equally sleek) remote each time I use it. Dorky as those remotes with the huge numbers that they make for senior citizens are, they make a certain amount of design sense. Electronic objects should be childishly easy to use and understandable at all times.

Why is the "power" light on my DVD player lit up when the power ISN'T on?

Sometimes I think the urge to be new really messes with the urge to make something functional.

Oh, and bring back volume dials. Those worked much better than those stupid buttons you have to push down and hold. But of course, they're not as sleek.

Obviously a luddite here. :)