Designing Out.

As a designer I had two basic roles; one, to make something more appealing, and two, to take cost out. Notice how kitchen cabinets used to have a drawer at the top, cupboard at the bottom. Not anymore. Drawers are expensive and a cabinet looks just as appealing without it; that is until you’ve built your kitchen and can’t find a place for your knives and forks, kitchen utensils and all those odds and sods that need a place of their own. So you buy a three-drawer unit for £170 only to find the sides have been standardised to the shallowest size and deep drawers are only surrounded by a shallow rim and things fall out. Then there’s obesity. It’s a big leap but stay with me. Food is designed and everything on your supermarket shelves from fruit and veg to ready meals and drinks are designed; designed to be max appealing and min production cost. Of course you don’t mention the true intention of the latter, you construct a virtue around it. Sodas, Coke, Pepsi etc are wonderful examples. They’ve long since ceased to be a natural fruity beverage and are just water, colorant, synthetic flavouring and aspartame. Aspartame is used as a sweetener because it’s cheaper than sugar but don’t say that, say it’s low calorie Diet Coke. The packaging, the bit you throw away is far more expensive than the product. Big bottles of Coke are half the price of cans because the packaging is cheaper. OK we’re all irrational and we ‘like’ what we like, largely because we’ve been trained to like it, but our bargain hunting instincts have led us to the ‘it looks delicious and it’s a nice price’ foods that, because they’ve been designed to use the cheapest ingredients, make us blow up like balloons. Our body doesn’t have the brainpower to figure out what we’re doing to it. We feed it the rubbish that our brain has been trained to like the look of and because it’s not nutritious it feels it’s being starved and so builds fat for a rainy day. But don’t worry, obesity will be eradicated along with disease, hunger and poverty as we progress towards a fully integrated on line X Box bodiless brain housed in a fist sized MFI cabinet. It’s a marketing man’s dream and the designer’s ultimate low cost solution. It’s only natural.