Winning Design
Why does place design, even award-winning design, not always
deliver good outcomes?
Sometimes architectural or system-wide innovation can only
be piecemeal, not unified. A well-known example is Los Angeles. No unified
design theory can practically be applied, and no naturally agreeable solution emerges
from the hundreds debated for the city’s sprawl and variability. Even the
airport, LAX, cannot arrive at a completely integrated redesign. Only Disneyland in Anaheim -- as Ray Bradbury
famously pointed out -- is the greater metro area’s “natural” center.
Portland, Oregon, on the other hand, has to be strictly
regulated to keep its “best walking city” Walkscore status. The city must struggle
directly against the car-based tendency to urban sprawl that keeps commuting
time and costs so high in the rest of the country. The Mercer study -- a ranking of quality of
life across world cities -- positions “good infrastructure” as a leading
indicator. Public space—in the US, at least--is constantly embroiled in a
contest between the needs of the driver and those of the pedestrian; deciding
which will win out as a serious design issue.
Other collateral damages: places that don’t work or actually spawn
crime, waste, boredom, stress (the result of other people as well as a bad
environment) and hazards as the price for ignoring human factors in the design
equation: useless parks, noisy, crowded, dangerous public transport lounges,
waiting rooms uncomfortable to wait in, slow post office lines, scary parking
garages, half-empty state capital city centers – I’m looking at you, Baton
Rouge--and deserted public squares. Dani
Pipano, founder of Gate 1 discount travel, stresses that safety and security
are his first priority when he searches out new and interesting world venues
for his tours. Comfort and attractions come in a distant second because without
them, there is simply no possibility of a desirable user experience.
Incremental disenchantment
Less successful places suffer from “incremental
disenchantment.” They just don’t work
the way people expect, and the more they are experienced, the more they
disappoint. A micro-example: Americans
are trained from birth that traffic moves on the right side of the road. This
carries over to how we walk through space. We tend to hug the right side of the
aisle in supermarkets as we also hug the right side of a public staircase. As a
result, when we approach a public building with double doors, we expect the entry
to be the one on the right.
We don’t think about this until we find ourselves in a place
where this is not the rule – start up a public staircase in Japan and you will
quickly learn to move to the left to avoid everyone coming straight at you on
their way down. We understand that things are different in another culture, but
they get truly weird when it happens in our own.
Near our home is a chain store with the strangest entryway –
it’s your basic double glass door with “Entrance” and “Exit” clearly marked--except,
due to an anomaly in the building design, the entrance door is on the left, with
the exit on the right. Even more
confusing is a railing installed between the doors to further separate them. So when you try to enter the right (wrong)
side, you then have to back away from the building to step around the railing,
compounding the first problem: setting directions that violate the expected
right-in, left-out rule. People are
constantly held up, diverted, confused, and annoyed by this odd entry.
People do not like being publicly embarrassed, and visibly fumbling
with an action as simple as a store entrance is a public embarrassment. Despite
being a branch of a major chain on a heavily trafficked street, the store is
the least busy of all its neighborhood branches. There is no way of measuring how
many customers simply walked away after being negatively conditioned by this awkward
and counter-intuitive experience.
A switched-up entry seems a small problem. But for the designer of greater spaces, bad
design experience (“How many visitors does your design keep away?”) is a hard lesson
to learn, since all that can be measured
is the admissions tally. Visitation numbers don’t include visitors who never
appear. And asking the visitors who do
show up about their experience—at museums, for example--does not include the
responses of the busloads of “under-served” schoolchildren (or as we like to
call them, the “uninterested”). Nor the interested
seniors kept away by the sheer noise of those busloads echoing the marble
halls.
Even designers who usually get it right can fail if they
start with the wrong premise. Disney’s California Adventure was a good idea
gone astray – not because of the rationalized answer “Why would anyone go to a
park about California when they are in the real California?” – but because the
Disney Imagineers did not build the same California people hold dear in their
minds.
There is, in fact, a virtual California that lives in the
minds of people worldwide based on generations of movies and television
programs. You can conjure it all up yourself without any prompting. It’s the
California of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Spanish colonial California of
Zorro, the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, Rosie the Riveter and swing music, redwood
forests, beach parties, and surf music. That’s the California people would pay
to see because it’s the one they dream about but and can’t find now in the real
thing.
Unfortunately, you can’t build a dream on a discount budget--what
management at the time tried to do. They cut corners, they wanted “synergy”
with their other brands, ESPN, and ABC, that had nothing to do with California
in the visitor mind. They built an
amusement pier because they wanted to use cheaper off-the-shelf carnival rides
rather than design the sort of unique attraction experiences Disney is noted
for. The result: It wasn’t California, and it wasn’t Disney.
A quick aside: at the time the park opened to a
less-than-stellar reception, we asked our late colleague, Senior Imagineer and
Disney legend John Hench, what he thought of the place. He just shrugged and
said, “It worked better as a parking lot.”
Which is the whole point of designing for the mind of the user – while the
parking lot met their expectations, California Adventure did not.
And this brings up a key point about designing for the mind
of the user. There is reality and there is hyperreality and you are building
for the latter. While it is historically
true that California had amusement piers – and still does, in the minds of
everyone outside California (the entire rest of the world) amusement piers are “owned”
by the East Coast as Coney Island and Atlantic City.
Design and purpose
We need to begin at the beginning of cultural time, starting
with Jericho, the first recognizable city from the Neolithic age in 10,000 BC
with its Temple to the Moon. Every place
ever built was created for a purpose.
And the foundation of every place ever built, from the mud and brick of
the first known civilization, Sumer, is set on and around a single platform:
the human brain.
Pylons and plaster are simply the materials necessary to
create any structure in 3D, where they can be experienced by the body through
behavior along the lines sparked by the mind and imagination of the native
builder or professional architect in real space and time. Oxford recalls England’s 11th-century
origins in its gothic revival landscape and the Renaissance in its Venetian
bridges. The Yale campus in New Haven, or the Princeton campus in New Jersey are
virtual British elite settings – Downton Abbey for academics. These places, besides their own local
functions, connect us cognitively and emotionally to other times, places,
people, and ways of life and the life of the mind. The imperial Romans themed
their villas to look like Greece, just as the English themed theirs to recall
Rome.
But plenty of structures within the built landscape are just
sheds to keep off the rain, wind, and sun, or even vaults with locks to keep
the stuff inside from moving or disappearing, commercial or residential. These are buildings with neither heart nor
art. Meanwhile, the best environments
are those we love to live with and within.
The better bedrooms, studios, patios, even basements, along with more
public offices, concert halls, and airports.
Far beyond acting as essential shelter, they make hundreds of other
functions possible, even easy, as a kind of technology to extend our potential
and prowess.
Such artful structures allow us to do more than work, study,
practice, produce, dine, converse, sleep, and dream; they energize our plans,
remind us of our past, and transport us into the future by igniting the
imagination through an act of immersive collective memory.
At the apex of these human pursuits enabled by well-designed
places is the American theme park, invented over sixty years ago. Or perhaps we should say re-invented. Its
precursors were many, from every era and continent: the Cardo – the ancient
Roman marketplace whose footprint is still visible in modern mall design; the
market towns of Europe and colonial America, royal parks and zoos, promenades
and pleasure palaces like the fabled Summer Palace of the Qing dynasty in
Beijing in 1750. The follies and ruins of Pompeii made -- and still make -- the
ancient world real and tangible to the modern.
Taken as a unified whole, good place design creates the
right conditions for something to occur or develop, by priming the minds inside
those buildings to think, make decisions, and act in one direction rather than
others.
Unfortunately, we value good design for the same reason we
value a precious gem – for its rarity. It
shouldn’t be that hard, and yet poor place design is the rule rather than the
exception. There is no single reason for this, but one of the key ones is the
lack of understanding of how the end-users actually think about space as the
move through it.
The next time there is a major building project near you,
look at the architect’s model and concept drawings and notice how the people
are placed – perhaps a half-dozen figures in a grand plaza – widely spaced and
doing nothing in particular except strolling through. We call it architecture
porn – the fevered dreams of the designer lovingly rendered as detailed drawings
starring the buildings, with people thrown in as an afterthought for scale.
The best, most-loved, places echo those that first live in
the human mind. That’s design principle Number One.
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