Imperfect designs, perfect products - Innovation

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 2003

What do paper cups, toothbrushes, grocery bags, kitchen faucets, doorknobs, and automobile cup holders have in common? They all are the imperfect products of designers seeking to come up with something better for consumers. Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, Durham, N.C., looks at the design of things we take for granted and concludes there can never be an end to the quest for the perfect design.

In Small Things Considered, Petroski notes that all plans involve choice, usually to satisfy competing constraints, whether they be cost, size, efficiency, or the myriad other factors that make the difference between a design that works and one that doesn't."... The design of made things, as opposed to design in nature and the artistic interpretation of it, necessarily proceed within the confines of the laws of science and economics. An ... inventor or designer of practical things must accept the realities of gravity and budgets, keeping his feet on the ground and his eye on the price."

Petroski examines a variety of common objects and how their designs evolved. Take the paper cup for example, which was spawned early last century when people began to realize that the communal tin cup from which everyone--healthy and sick alike--drank at the public water barrel, well, pump, or spigot often was the source of germs and disease.

Inventor and entrepreneur Lawrence W. Luellen eventually came up witb a design that had a flange around the top edge of a cup to stiffen it and make it easier to dispense one at a time from a stack of nested cups in a machine. Luellen and his partners later named the product the Dixie cap.

While most people now drink water from their own plastic bottles, the Dixie cup remains widely in use. Not so for the paper grocery bag, which was developed in the mid 1800s. The plastic bag was introduced into American supermarkets in the mid 1970s and its sturdy handles, which enable shoppers to carry many more bags at a time, are among its most competitive features. "The plastic bag has clearly become the container of choice, we shoppers adjusting to its limitations the way we adjust to those of all designs. The once near-perfect upstanding paper grocery bag has mostly been displaced by something that is at the same time superior and yet inferior. That is the way it often is with designed objects."