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A short history of door handles | Apollo Magazine
perform less efficiently and be more difficult to use. For example, a door with a handle affords pulling. Sometimes, doors with handles are designed to open only by pushing—the affordance of the handle conflicts with the door’s function. Replace the handle with a flat plate, and it now affords pushing—the affordance of the flat plate corresponds to
... See moreWilliam Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler • Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design
Design makes possible or impossible the means of practical use, but it is also a pointed commentary on the meaning of bodies that move through spaces. A city with only hard-angle ups-and-downs, curbs, and steps to all its doors and entrances is a city that assumes a strong ambulatory body, unencumbered by injury of any kind, unaccompanied by an old
... See moreSara Hendren • What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
Floors and clothing are exemplary everyday built environments, so pervasive that we tend not to notice them. They structure our every intimate, mundane, and extraordinary encounters with our own and others’ bodies and environments.
Tom Critchlow • LF08 - Embodied Futures
As it turns out, much of design is about capitalizing on that gap. In the design of objects, understanding the careful balance of mind-body coordination is what makes for useful ones. A good object is not one that you want to be rid of, nor one that functions best when you are distracted. And yet, in the world of visual media, distraction has been
... See morechrbutler.com • What Eyes Want - Christopher Butler
The key elements of good entry point design are minimal barriers, points of prospect, and progressive lures.1
William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler • Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wal
... See moreAlain de Botton • The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage International)
Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. They are the beginnings and endings of every true story, the passages between that lead to adventures and madness and—here he smiled—even love. Without doors the worlds would grow stagnant, calcified, storyless.
Alix E. Harrow • The Ten Thousand Doors of January
we may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn’t much matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated – professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences.