User-centered interior design
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User-centered interior design
Lessons from Charlotte Perriand on what can go wrong when you neglect your user—even if the intended user is you.
I’m working through Charlotte Perriand’s autobiography, A Life of Creation, and within the first 100 pages, she’s already given us some great parables on the importance of understanding your user.
New and improved desk—drawers not included
In one story, she recounts being asked to redesign the waiting room at the Ministry of Agriculture to promote newly passed legislation regulating the corn trade. She decided to cover the walls with a combination of photo montage and infographics to highlight the human side of the program along with data supporting the benefits.
She notes the minister had chosen “stately decorative furniture” and then realizes they forgot to account for the attendant’s desk:
The reception hall, however, had been forgotten, as had its attendant, who sat regally behind a dowdy desk of oxidized oak, stamped with wear and tear; it was like a cockpit, enclosed on three sides. Monnet asked me to replace it. I came up with a simple design consisting of a beautiful stone slab placed on two columns…
I’ll pause here to consider the significance of the change that has taken place. They went from a heavy, wooden desk that evokes a bureaucratic command center to a structure that sounds like it might be more at home in a museum garden installation. Did they consider how the desk was used? And by whom? She continues:
…but I made a big mistake in that I forgot to consult the user—the attendant. When I switched the desks, I came across a whole other world: drawers harboring handkerchiefs, sweets, and all sorts of paper; and a wastepaper basket lying on the floor with its sides ripped open, along with an empty bottle of water and slippers.
After courageously owning the mistake, she takes us through a step that might have been helpful to do before coming up with a solution: seeing how the current desk was being used. What was going on with the “ripped open” trash can? And what, if anything, did that have to do with the slippers and empty water bottle? I have no idea. But that’s the point. People have idiosyncrasies that seem weird to us but are perfectly reasonable to them. We can’t know or understand those things unless we talk to the people we’re designing for. Eventually they spoke, and after all that, it seemed to turn out OK for the attendant.
Several days later, the attendant came up to me and asked if I would insert a locking drawer, since he was entrusted with holding confidential documents for visitors. A small, double-locking box sealed onto the cloakroom wall did the trick.
In the end, they found a creative solution. And it didn’t involve altering the profile of the beautiful slab and columns. Maybe the attendant didn’t need all those tissues and sweets after all. (Or maybe they ended up strewn on the desktop eventually.) But it’s a charming anecdote about how simple conversations can help avoid costly mistakes.
Futuristic storage—50 years ahead of its time
In the 1920s, Perriand and her mentor Le Corbusier were trying to shift people’s mindset on interior design away from pieces like ornate chests of drawers and hulking wardrobes to more rational, geometric, modular storage. These new units were designed to meet the needs of “limited living space in cities” and “contemporary architecture” and were intended for mass production.
These 1928 storage units were standardized and contained two elements, one of which was double-height. They could be stacked or juxtaposed, could serve as partial or total partitioning, and were intended to respond to all storage needs in the dwelling. They were made of a notched metal frame clad in lacquered sheet metal, which provided for highly flexible interior fittings: drawers and racks, combined with shelving in clear or milk glass or wood. They could take up a screenlike position, usable on both sides. Doors in clear glass, opaque material, or sheet aluminum could be attached to the facade’s sliding metal frames.
Looking back from the twenty-first century, this sounds quite familiar—like something we’ve seen and probably built from Ikea. But 100 years ago, it was a revolutionary approach to interior storage. From this description, however, I’m getting an “all things to all people” vibe, which should raise red flags. When something is designed to do it all, it can end up not doing any one thing really well. If they were so great, surely Perriand and her fellow designers used them in their own studio, right?
We innocently believed that architects would use these storage units in their designs. They were, after all, open-plan. But they weren’t even used by the Le Corbusier atelier (studio), with one or two exceptions; similarly, they were never mass-produced, despite Corbu’s appeal… They were to remain prototypes.
Eventually the design was revived and manufactured by Cassina—in the late 1970s. So maybe they were just early. But when you’ve built something that could theoretically be used by you and your team, and you don’t find yourself using it, ask yourself why. In Paul Graham’s essay, How To Do Great Work, which I’ve been reading after hearing the Founder’s podcast episode on it, he explains to ambitious entrepreneurs how to figure out what to work on. “If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want.” He makes a point of this because he says so many people get it wrong. “Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost.”
These are some initial passages and thoughts on Charlotte Perriand’s A Life of Creation. My plan is to finish the book and have a new podcast episode out in the next couple weeks. To get notified when it’s out, subscribe here on Substack or find Designer Sketches where ever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for reading!