Ask the Right Question

A little while ago, a young colleague asked me: “Since you take an interest in these things, can you tell me what kitchen is best suited to a person who has to use a wheelchair?” He had been commissioned to adapt a flat to the new requirements of a client who had come out of hospital, but in a wheelchair.

“Ask the right question” is an approach to the design process that draws a distinction between the moment when information is gathered (which takes the shape of formulating the right questions and seeking answers) and the actual creative design process.

If asking the right question is a part of the design process, looking for the answer is an art.

The designer is the last one to act in chain of decision-making, because he is the one who translates the ideas into practical works. Everyone can/must contribute to defining the design decisions, on the basis of the vantage point provided by his or her particular discipline. But in the end it is the designer who defines what will ultimately be made or built. Before this, everyone is entitled to make all the comments and propose all the variables imaginable, but once the designer gets to work, there is no going back.

In complex products, regardless of the scale of their production (small runs or large series), ergonomic design research sets out to cater for the new demands of interdisciplinarity of approach and in particular seems to have become indispensable for developing high-risk objects with a high degree of technological content, i.e. those objects that call for such massive investments that the risk of failure must be reduced to a minimum, or those objects in which the system is so critical that even the slightest lack of correspondence between man and machine may cause damage out of all proportion to the scale of the anomalous event that produced it. Malfunctions are notoriously often caused by ‘misunderstandings’ between a technological system and the humans who govern it. Many of the accidents that are attributed to ‘human error’ are actually brought about by such ‘misunderstandings’ that occur when people react instinctively to an unexpected event or a particularly stressful situation in ways that deviate from the models they have learned. Many accidents, even the most disastrous ones, can be traced back to such misunderstandings between man and machine, to inadequate legibility or comprehensibility of signals and messages or to the difficulty involved in learning or remembering the correct procedures to be followed.

All over Europe (and also in other places) in the seventies, dangerous work was entrusted to foreign migrant workers (Gastarbeiter) who tended not to be members of trade unions. These ‘second class’ workers would spend a few years working in a factory and then go back home. Since Italy had not yet experienced foreign immigration, but only a massive shift of working population from the south to the north of the country, we only had ‘first class’ workers. For this reason, the solution to environmental problems in Italy was not the turnover of migrant workers, but the need to design healthy environments.

From the very start, ergonomics has focused primarily on the workplace: the place where effort is expended and where danger lurks. Yet it did not take long to realise that the problems found in the everyday living environment are not so very different from those of the working environment and that the tools devised for the workplace could also be applied to good effect to everyday life.

Most of us have known people whose capacities have undergone drastic change at some stage in their lives. Sometimes it is a traumatic experience, the result of an accident or an operation, while in other cases it is a more gradual process brought about by ageing. The simple process of ageing is strange, as I know from personal experience: for a long time you feel as though nothing has changed, or that the changes that have taken place have no influence, then all of a sudden you realise that so much has changed. All it takes is a minor accident, a moment’s distraction or a comparison.