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  • By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
  • Reed Benhamou (bio)
By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons. By Ralph Caplan. 2nd ed.New York: Fairchild, 2004. Pp. xx+267. $42.

I remember the first edition of By Designwith great fondness. While perhaps not the best of the books that mined the vein of design's shortcomings in the 1970s and 1980s, it was witty, succinct, and straightforward. Moreover—Ralph Caplan being a describer rather than a practitioner of design—it had a reportorial quality that distinguished it from its more polemical contemporaries, such as Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World(1984).

The second edition of Caplan's book retains all of the positive qualities of the first. It is still witty, succinct, straightforward, and objective. With the welcome exception of Milton Glaser's charming sketch of the Hotel Louis XIV bathroom (p. 180), illustrations are now in color and depict updated versions of situations and products first discussed in 1982 (no easy task—the gumdrop iMac [p. 7] was probably out of production before the second edition went to press). If the paean to Charles and Ray Eames remains, this is less anachronistic than it might appear, the Eames house and approach having been featured in the January 2005 Metropolis. While the second edition updates only a few references to popular culture (CNN enters, but Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstarremains), it does give more space to interior (as opposed to industrial) design. It also recognizes new products and issues: the Herman Miller firm's now-iconic Aeron chair is integrated into chapter 4, and the new ninth chapter addresses accessibility.

Beyond such tweaks, the text is little changed, nor in most cases does it need to be. The flaws in the interface between people and what academics label the "proximate environment" are apparently eternal, and Caplan's 1982 analysis of what design does, and does to us, remains valid.

That in itself is less than reassuring. The title of "industrial designer" (if not the equivalent responsibilities) is more than two hundred years old; [End Page 630]witness the 1775 designation of C. F. Delahaye and his two sons as dessinateurs industrielsin Paris guild records. But while the design profession is relatively new (and some branches are newer than others), design activities—often somewhat pretentiously defined as "creative problem solving"—are as old as we are (or even older, if our prehuman ancestors used primitive tools as chimpanzees do today). In addition, design approaches have been formally taught (if variously defined) for at least the last century, and most have given at least a nod to fitting the product to the user rather than the other way round. Why are there (still) so many failures? Or, to cite Caplan, why is it that "the designer appears to be at least as much the problem as the solution" (p. 4)?

Certainly the situation has not improved since Caplan first wrote that phrase. "Situation" is the operative word, and, as the many indexed references to "situation design" demonstrate, "design" may create scenarios in which we are but hapless players. To give a nontextual example: in 1982, a can of condensed pea soup could be emptied into a saucepan with a manual or electric can-opener and air pressure; as a bonus, the soup made a rude noise as it left the can that was guaranteed to amuse children. In 2005, arthritics must maneuver the "easy-open pop-top" with a church key; contents must be scraped from the can and rim with a spatula (the diameter of the soup being greater than that of the opening); the only rude noise is made by the cook; and no one is amused.

If you are a first-timer, By Design"2" is a worthwhile read. One caveat: design historians (I raise my hand) still have reason to grouse about Caplan's cavalier attitude toward time and texts—not his lack of footnotes (even historians can be realists), but his tendency to present...

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