Unpleasant Design - When Bad Design is Used to Hide Problems - Extra Credits

Before we start, big thanks to Ethan Richie and Gem Williams for handling the art for us this week. In September of 2017, the city of Seattle placed 18 shiny new bike racks underneath a bridge that was slated for demolition in less than a year. Why? Unpleasant design. Today's topic is kind of a heavy one. It's less about game design than design in general, and it serves to remind us of the power and the danger of design. Unpleasant design, also often referred to as hostile architecture, is the practice of excluding a group of people from a space in such a way that most people won't even notice. It's exclusionary design. In Seattle's case, the bike racks weren't put there for bicyclists. They were put up so that homeless people couldn't camp under the bridge. These racks were literally rushed in right after the police came and swept a group of people out of one of the few dry places left to stay in

the city as we entered the heavy rains of early winter. And they were put there so citizens wouldn't have to have the burden of denying people a dry place to sleep on their conscience. Most people wouldn't even give much thought to why those bike racks were put there. It would just seem like the city had added some bike racks, and thus people wouldn't have to experience the distress of thinking about what happens to all the people who previously lived there. And wouldn't complain about it. This is an incredibly common municipal practice. If you've ever been at a bus stop with one of those leaning benches, just sort of a rail along the side of the thing instead of a proper bench, that is there for the same reason. So people can't sleep there. You would be surprised how much money and energy go into hostile design. The Camden bench is an example from London of an expensive replacement for a standard bench whose primary features are that it is angled in such a way that it is impossible to sleep on or skateboard across. And if you've ever wondered why there are weird metal flanges on architecture like these in

the Embarcadero in San Francisco or these in London, those are not an aesthetic choice. They are there to keep people from skateboarding along it. Or if you've ever been in a public bathroom lit with weird blue light and wondered why that is, those lights are there to make it harder for drug users to find a vein. Sometimes it's even simpler than that. If you've ever been to a store in a popular area and for some reason they're all playing what you would consider to be bad country, classical, or opera music, this is often an attempt to make the spot less cool so young people won't hang out near there. Heck, there is even a system called a mosquito that's been installed in a number of places that theoretically makes a buzzing noise too high-pitched for anybody over 25 to hear. Unpleasant design isn't new though. It goes way back. In the 1800s in Norwich, they didn't have enough public restrooms and public urination became a problem. But instead of immediately installing more public restrooms, they started to build the walls of buildings so that they were sloped in just such a way that anybody

trying to pee on them would have it splash back on their clothes. Today, from Cologne to San Francisco, we use hydrophobic paint instead. Then there are the subtler examples. In Terminal 5 of Heathrow, there are far too few seats for the number of people passing through, but there's lots of seating in the shops. So if you want to sit, you had better be able to afford to hang out at the restaurants. And if you can't afford it, well, discomfort might drive you in there anyway. But the vast majority of unpleasant design is targeted at the homeless. If you've ever seen benches with unnecessary armrests, piles of rocks to break up flat surfaces in an architectural design, or just those random little nubbins along windows, stoops, or the sidewalk, those all exist to keep people from sleeping there or even from just staying there for too long. If you have ever sat on a bench with all of those little random micro holes? Those are there for the same reason, to make the bench colder so people don't rest there for too long. The problem with this kind of stuff is

that rather than address any of the root causes of homelessness, the goal of this design is to address the fact that many people are uncomfortable with seeing homelessness. It's not concerned with why that makes us uncomfortable. It's not concerned over whether maybe we should be uncomfortable, not with homeless people but with homelessness itself. Unpleasant design devotes large amounts of money to allow us to go about our pleasant lives and blissfully ignore problems, allowing those in charge of solving those problems to simply sweep them under the rug rather than confronting them or actually trying to find a solution. It takes resources that could be used to actually address those issues and spends them instead helping us put those issues out of mind. It's pretty unconscionable. There is a small ray of hope here though, because when people are made aware of what those types of design are meant to do, they tend to rebel against it. Every time the populace actually realizes what's going on, there are all sorts of efforts made to render those unpleasant designs

benign. From mattresses thrown over anti-homeless spikes to people cutting the unnecessary arms off of those benches. Humanity as a whole tends to be better than the politicians who deploy these things. And those bike racks I mentioned in Seattle? A citizen who realized what was going on put in a public information request about them. It turns out they were absolutely there for no other reason than to deter the homeless. And the emails acquired from the public information request got passed to one of the local papers. The populace was outraged when they found out and they flooded the mayor's office with demands to have them removed. Recently, it was announced that those bike racks would be taken out. Hopefully, they should be gone before this episode goes live. Thank you very much for sticking with us for this episode. I know it wasn't about games, but this stuff is still really important. It's important to our world, our cities, and the way we see the space we live in. And it's also important to an understanding of design, because design should be about solving problems, not hiding them. We'll see you next

week.