by Alex Bozikovic
The Toronto Star
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Page: D12
Section: Entertainment

The Human Factor

by Kim Vicente

Knopf Canada , 305 pages, $24

Small Things Considered

Why There Is No Perfect Design

by Henry Petroski

Knopf Canada , 290 pages, $37

What do we mean when we talk about "design"? Since interior design has exploded into the cultural mainstream, most of us think of choosing sheets and curtains - ornamentation.

But if you ask Toronto 's Bruce Mau, one of the world's leading designers, design is everywhere, and it has substance. "For the most part," Mau has written, "style is a decision about how we will live. Style is not superficial. It is a philosophical project of the deepest order."

This is a long way from Martha Stewart. In fact, Mau calls on designers to provide alternatives to the juggernaut of consumer culture - to help us escape Martha commands. Yet this argument seems out of scale. Is our choice of draperies so important? Surely we "produce life" (to use Mau's phrase) in more substantial ways choosing our friends, our careers, our codes of ethics, our social and political systems.

Two new books, both by professors of engineering, provide answers to this question. Both Kim Vicente's The Human Factor and Henry Petroski's Small Things Considered suggest there is an unbreakable connection between big questions and small things in two words, human nature. Yet after examining such things as toothbrushes and control panels, these two books offer radically different world views.

Kim Vicente began The Human Factor to explain his academic discipline human factors engineering - which is, mostly, the field better known as ergonomics. To his credit, the University of Toronto professor does a lively job of explaining his line of work. It is a kind of mediation between gadgets and people.

Most engineers, he points out, are concerned with making devices that work. But a system that is technically reliable can also be difficult or counterintuitive to use, in which case it becomes useless, even dangerous. (Think of your stove; do you know which switch turns on the front left burner?) He identifies that mindset, which ignores everything but technology, as "mechanistic." Human factors engineers work to make sure that design takes stock of people, too.

Vincente gives plenty of examples in which mechanism can kill, or save lives. The Chernobyl disaster was facilitated by the poor design of the gauges in the control room. In commercial aviation, a more abstract design, teamwork training for flight crews, has prevented many disasters.

For Vicente, these are both forms of "technology," in which he includes everything from keyboards to hiring policies. And, he writes, these different systems are "so far beyond human control that (they are) threatening the future of humankind."

Vicente's big idea is a response to this broad sentiment. The insights of human factors, he argues, can be applied to more abstract problems - from managing doctors to designing government. We have "more than enough knowledge," he argues, "to do far better than we're currently doing." Paying more attention to "the human factor" could make the world safer, more productive, more humane. In other words, we should design a better world. It is a large ambition, in line with Bruce Mau's ideal of benevolent design.

Yet in Small Things Considered, Henry Petroski explains why design - even on a small scale - will always fail us. Petroski does not address the same broad territory as Vicente, but focuses on the design of familiar objects - the touch-tone telephone, duct tape, toothbrushes, desk chairs. Thus, the book is an engaging anecdotal history of 19th- and 20th-century design.

Each example illustrates Petroski's theme design is a series of compromises, each object shaped by the different demands of form, function and cost. While no design is perfect, users settle for what they get. We get used to an object's failings, make excuses for them.

Petroski, who has written a number of books on design for the average reader (The Pencil; The Evolution Of Useful Things), makes his point in a variety of contexts, from home building to the layout of supermarkets. The result is a useful counterpoint to The Human Factor's grand statements. Vicente's field does come up here, but in a broader context.

In creating a toothbrush, Petroski explains, industrial designers consider some basic facts about human nature how large people's hands are, how and why they brush their teeth. This is the human factor. But the designers also have to consider other things What shape of toothbrush consumers will want to buy, and how it will fit into a toothbrush holder? (Oral-B's CrossAction brush, famously, didn't.)

Indeed, design can be driven by the capricious demands of marketing even at the expense of efficiency and logic. One notorious example is Christopher Sholes's QWERTY keyboard, designed in 1868, which makes typing slow and inefficient; this was (allegedly) by design, to prevent typewriter jams.

Considering such cynical realities, Vicente's goals for design seem Utopian. It isn't that he is unaware of the market; he calls on us to improve the world by demanding more human-friendly design. But what if the market fails to provide us with the ideal product? And what if we don't always want what's best for us?

That dilemma becomes obvious when Vicente leaves his area of expertise to discuss politics and social organization - what he unfortunately terms "intellectual thought." What works well as design criticism translates in political terms as a kind of utilitarianism.

To a certain extent, it is persuasive. Vicente's case study of the Walkerton water tragedy explores how the Harris Tories, in the heady days of 1995, made policy choices that would work against the public good. After the fact, the O'Connor commission held the government responsible for failing to consider the risks of its policies. But in Vicente's human-tech terms, what happened at Walkerton wasn't simply possible; it, or a disaster like it, was inevitable. The Tories' water policy displayed an ignorance of the way people behave - such people as the Koebel brothers of Walkerton's public utilities commission.

But then, it's difficult to design a solution to chance and negligence. Even Vicente admits there is no chart that captures human nature. While there is "a great deal of timeless, pragmatically useful knowledge about human nature and politics," Vicente is more than a little vague about that knowledge. He alludes to Machiavelli, though, so it is no surprise that he sometimes confuses the goals of government with political expediency. He seems to suggest that a party's platform, "tailored to its constituents' wishes," will be a good thing. But as Walkerton demonstrated, sometimes what voters want is against the public good, and sometimes they get it anyway. Politics, like design, is all about compromise.

This doesn't take away from Vicente's better points. Smarter product design and more realistic policy - in medicine, for instance, where doctors can never admit making a mistake - could save many lives. It's useful to note that a toothbrush and a policy "design" are both creations of our ingenuity, things we can change for the better. There is no such thing as perfect "style," and we can accept that. But on some things, we aren't willing to compromise.

Toronto 's Alex Bozikovic is a frequent contributor to these pages.

Illustration:
• SEALSKIN COAT AD FROM 'THE QUEEN' MAGAZINE, 1900 / FROM 'VICTORIAN ADVERTISEMENTS'