Everyday Design Successes #1 — Cooking Stove
This article is the first of a series. Next: EDS#2
This article is the first installment in the series opposite to the one I began yesterday, entitled “Everyday Design Failures.” I guessed yesterday that my post today might be my notes for Chapter 2 from DOET, but I had a project due tonight and didn’t have time to finish the chapter, so I’ve postponed that one until tomorrow. Accordingly, my article today will also be brief, highlighting one of the principles of discovery: mapping.
This is the stove at my parents’ house. This is roughly what it looks like to me, and anyone else that’s taller than the stove, which is just about everyone. What’s so great about it is the image displayed next to each of the controls for the burners:
I believe it should be obvious to everyone that this simple dot structure by each handle indicates which burner it operates. This is an example of natural mapping. Mapping draws relationships between the elements of two sets of things, often a set of controls and a set of objects that will respond to the controls. Natural mapping takes advantage of preexisting psychological principles like spatial analogies, cultural standards, or Gestalt grouping principles to map actions more effectively. In this case, the dots form a spatial analogy to the five burners that are clearly visible in the first picture while standing near the stove.
So, observant people, you’re right that there were six handles on the stove. What’s the sixth one for? It operates the light, and I think this is a good place to put it, next to every other control for the stove. The other day, in the kitchen at the other house I live in, my roommate asked me to turn off the light on our stove by hitting the switch “up above.” Above the controls for the hot pads, along the back, was a switch — I hit it and I couldn’t tell if anything happened at all. It also turned out to be the wrong switch — the real answer was another one, on a bar above the stove, making a third different location in which stove controls existed. Not so great, and maybe the next target of Everyday Design Failures — stay tuned.
