Back in the 1980s, the design expert Donald Norman was chatting to a colleague when his office phone rang. He finished his sentence before reaching for the phone, but that delay was a mistake. The phone stopped ringing and, instead, his secretary’s phone started ringing on a desk nearby. The call had been automatically re-routed. Alas, it was 6pm, and the secretary had gone home.
Norman hurried over to pick up the second phone, only to find it stopped too. “Ah, it’s being transferred to another phone,” he thought. Indeed, a third phone in the office across the hall started to sound. As he stepped over, the phone went silent. A fourth phone down the hall started ringing. Was the call doomed to stagger between phones like a drunkard between lampposts? Or had a completely different call coincidentally come in?
Norman tells the story in The Design of Everyday Things, the opening chapter of which is a collection of psychopathic objects from bewildering telephone systems to rows of glass doors in building lobbies that simply offer no clue whether to push or pull or even where the hinges are. “Pretty doors,” jokes Norman. “Elegant. Probably won a design award.”