Day: 29 June 2008

… I plan to visit Kensal Green Cemetery again. Haven’t done so in over 25 years. The last time I did it, sometime in 1982, I didn’t get the chance to see all I wanted to. Some people have this real thing about cemeteries, I am not one of them. Until I discovered Kensal Green Cemetery, South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta was the only one for me. It was close to where I was born, close to where I grew up, close to my school, close to my college, close to the people and things I cared about. There were many days when I went to visit friends “cutting through” the cemetery even though I didn’t need to, there was such a sense of history there.

Kensal Green Cemetery is in a different class. Here’s a sample of the people buried or cremated there:

Charles Babbage, the man behind the difference engine; Charles Blondin, acrobat and tightrope walker; Robert Brown (of Brownian motion fame); Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Wilkie Collins, of The Moonstone and The Woman In White; George Cruikshank, the Dickens illustrator; Leigh Hunt, the writer of Abou ben Adhem, whose tribe may increase; Freddie Mercury; Terence Rattigan of The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables; Howard Staunton, who gave us the Staunton chess pieces; William Makepeace Thackeray; Anthony Trollope, creator of Barsetshire.

And two other people. Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, the reasons why I went there in the first place. Here’s a sample of the Daniells’ output:

Calcutta used to be a City of Palaces. The Daniells were the ones that let me see what used to be, and what could be again, as I walked the streets in my youth. So I will go back to Kensal Green Cemetery sometime this month. And yes, I will be back at South Park Street as well, sometime in the next twelve months. Been too long.

There was a strange story making the rounds a few years ago: apparently someone had thought up the idea of etching images of house flies on public urinals; boys being boys and men being men, they “took aim”. And suddenly “spillage” was reduced by lots and lots. You can see the story here.

When I was reading that in 2005, I’d already become obsessed by the Clay Shirky mantra about damage and repair: if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then things that are “in the commons” are less likely to have tragic (as in Garrett Hardin) consequences. Well that’s my wording and interpretation anyway, apologies if I’ve got anything wrong.

What it did was make me think slightly differently about design. I started considering opportunities to reduce the cost of repair by minimising the need for repair. From a design perspective, what could we do to reduce the likelihood of damage and thereby reduce the cost of repair?

As serendipity would have it, I was thinking about these things while waiting for the flight back from Copenhagen, and found this in the men’s washroom at the lounge:

So it wasn’t just Schiphol airport where you could go up and see someone’s etchings in the washroom. Anyway, seeing it made me think about other places where the design of something reduces wastage and obviates the need for repair. And that made me think of this:

Now that’s a photograph of a room in the Wine Residence in Shanghai, a wonderful place where you can acquire wine, store it, taste it, learn about it and even trade it. I was taken around it by a close friend, and I loved the built-in spittoons. What did I like about it? Well, I’d seen spittoons being used in places where you learn about wine before, but they were usually set apart from where you were. You had to go to the spittoon. I come from India, where a lot of people chew betel leaf and betel nut.

And while spittoons can be found occasionally, what you tend to see is dried-blood scars on walls and floors in public places, as people aimed for the spittoons and missed. Here’s a sample (actually taken from the Solomon Islands, not India, but the point remains. My thanks to Everything Everywhere, Flickr and Creative Commons):

Where is all this taking me? It’s Sunday and I’m thinking lazily, provisionally. I started wondering whether Mac desktops used to be “dirtier” before someone thought of putting the Trash can there. Whether personal information would be more accurate if we presented the tools for repairing the information more usefully. That kind of thing.

If we take design seriously, we need to work harder at reducing the cost of repair. Sometimes that means doing what we can in design to reduce the need for repair.