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By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons

Book by Ralph Caplan · 4 quotes · Design, Museums, Anxiety

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By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons Quotes

“The prospect of physical discomfort has not deterred anyone from buying, or sitting in, chairs that hurt. A painful chair, however, is more willingly bought and endured if it carries the imprimatur of a museum or some other respectable design authenticator. Randall Jarrell noted, with great wit but no exaggeration, that there are people who "...will sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won't buy and sit in if you tell him that it is a chair...”

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“Museums, whatever their content, are logical design arenas. Their renewed vitality reflects a spreading curatorial perception that a museum is a designed situation more than it is a warehouse open to the public. This in turn has made it possible for a great many people, including children, to perceive museum-going as something to do, rather than something that is done to you.”

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“The experience of riding in a subway or elevator calls to mind Bertrand Russell's remark that much of modern anxiety stems from the time we spend in unnatural proximity to strangers without the preliminary sniffing that is instinctive in animals, including us.”

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“For the very nature of the product designer's role in industry tends to militate against his effectiveness. He is schooled--and presumably motivated--to design things for people; but he is retained to design things for the market.”

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