Title: Decoding the Design History of Your Coffee Cup Lid
Context: Not all user experience problems are about saving the world.
Synopsis: One of my all-time favorite design books is Henry Petroski’s “The Evolution of Useful Things”. I find the way products and experiences evolve over time to be fascinating. The way unconnected designers manage to iterate on a single problem, constantly working to improve the solution, seemingly uncoordinated yet thoughtfully aggregated. In truth, design revolutions are rare things. More likely, improvements are made incrementally, slowly building to a crescendo of delight, each addition (or indeed subtraction) ratcheting up usability in parallel acts of unspoken collaboration. Design Darwinism tends to be the rule rather than the exception. We do not always need to stand on the shoulders of giants to make progress. Sometimes by simply looking over the shoulder of someone just like us we advance the cause.
Best Bit: “Coffee lids are modest modern marvels, but we rarely slow down and take the time to consider, admire, or even wonder about these humble masterpieces.”
via atlasobscura.com
Leave a Reply