Why a Toaster Is a Design Triumph

The user interface of a toaster is an unlikely starting place for an essay about the nature of design, but it turns out to be a way into a discussion of some challenging questions, including whether design is an exercise in democracy, an act of genius, or something else altogether. The conclusion is that the purpose of design is to make things more the essence of themselves, and that in this example, at least, it is to identify an ‘obvious but still unseen problem’ and to solve that problem in ‘in an elegant way that is also delightful to use’.

That risks collapsing into triteness, but the underlying question is a good one. Toasters have been around – fundamentally unchanged – for a century. So radically changing how they work (while at the same time barely changing how they work at all) is not a trivial achievement. It’s worth reflecting both on what lessons that might have for the application of design to public services – and on what obvious but unseen problems are waiting to be found.

Ian Bogost – The Atlantic

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