A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Of Doors and Perception: Practising Empathy in Product Design
In the realm of product design, affordance refers to the properties of an object, the manipulations and operations that it allows. A door, for example, affords opening and closing. A person might argue that one attribute of a well-designed door is its ease of operation; in particular, it should prompt the user either to push or to pull it to afford passage. Pretty basic stuff, really. Yet think of the number of times you have instinctively pushed a door because its design triggered that response, only to discover that pulling was required.
A former professor and founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, Donald A. Norman explores such issues in his book, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Reading, MA, USA; Addison-Wesley, 1992). He cites the example of doors with flat plates that "clearly and unambiguously afford pushing" but which, for reasons of poor design, must be pulled. That is why "so many doors have to have instructions on them," according to Norman. Products with counterintuitive designs abound, as the ubiquitous blinking clock on the VCR incessantly reminds us. "Bad design has to resort to signs or instruction manuals to overcome the design flaws," Norman writes. "Why do people design such things? To a large extent because they lack empathy with the users of their devices."
Designers of medical devices don't have that luxury. On the contrary, they must go to great lengths to preempt opportunities for confusion or misuse. While there is always room for improvement, the medical device industry by and large is well aware of the importance of optimizing the product-user interface. Some companies surpass the already high standards of the device industry, and to recognize their achievements Canon Communications llc launched the Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) in 1997. What Norman defines as empathy in product design is one of the key characteristics shared by the 12 products that received gold awards in the 1999 competition. The philosophy behind the winning design of a disposable device for handling blood-typing samples is a telling example.
"To get users to accept the Hematype sampler, we needed to make it take the least amount of time and use the fewest number of steps," says Alan Wanderer, medical director at Medical Safety Products Inc. "The product had to be so simple, so intuitive, that we could just send it out with an instruction sheet and the workers could use it."
Few products, it seems to me, are better suited to the notion of empathy in design than medical devices. These products are intended to save and prolong lives or to relieve pain, and a patient seeing his or her physician should not have to worry about poorly designed medical equipment. It is to industry's credit that healthcare consumers rarely do.
On the other hand, they may be well advised to think twice before pushing to open the door to the doctor's office.
Canon Communications is currently accepting applications for the 2000 MDEA programme, which is open to all manufacturers of commercially available medical components, materials, and finished devices. While you are attending the Medical Equipment Design & Technology Exhibition & Conference in Amsterdam, don't hesitate to stop by the Canon stand (#423) to discuss the programme and pick up an entry form. You can also learn more about the competition or register to enter by logging onto http://www.MDEAwards.com, phoning +1 310 4454200, or faxing +1 310 4454299.
Norbert Sparrow
