Title: How Ideo Redesigned Monday to Be Less Awful
Context: Hating Monday’s days are numbered thanks to design.
Synopsis: Your alarm goes off in a shriek of canned, looping banality. Your calendar overflows with other miserable souls who too have left a piece of their humanity behind in the faintly remembered joy of the preceding weekend. You trudge into the day armed only with flinty despair and a razor-thin glimmer of hope that today, like all horrible things, must too end…eventually. Welcome to Monday; the day that design forgot. We pride ourselves on making things better through the power of design. Time spent shopping. Working with business tools. Driving. Eating. Conversing. All of these activities soar atop the shoulders of human ingenuity that has created myriad ways of improving their attendant experiences. Yet Monday stands alone, raw in its unapproachability, naked in its derision, left to fend for itself with nary a morsel of human thought expanded in its direction to improve it, or at least, make it marginally less awful. Let us not forget that design does not discriminate in its power to amend. It does not ignore the intractable problem, nor does it walk away from an insurmountable challenge. No, design is brave, and we as designers should find strength in that courage and seek to repair any problem we encounter, no matter how unavailing our mercy may at first appear.
Best Bit: “Monday has become a scapegoat for our unhappiness. We’ve been conditioned to dread it, even if the things we hate about Monday really have nothing to do with with the day itself. In other words, first workday of the week had a perception problem.”
via wired.com
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