This makes me very angry.
These are anti-homeless benches designed to look pleasing. It’s called hostile architecture. They’re meant to be uncomfortable to discourage sleeping on.
The people who designed these are assholes. They’re decorators, not designers.
A designer makes things to improve the world for everyone. A decorator takes otherwise unpalatable injustices and disguises them with aesthetics in an attempt to make them inoffensive or even desirable.
Be a designer, not a decorator.
…The benches are marketed as “Designer Book Benches” by a company called OverHertz in Bulgaria.
https://www.overhertz.com/service-book-benches
Hostile architecture doesn’t just exist in the physical world. Big Tech and the surveillance-based mainstream technology of Silicon Valley is concocted by decorators not designers.
I once gave a talk to a roomful of designers called “Design or Decoration” where I go into the distinction further: https://ar.al/talks/#design-or-decoration
#HostileArchitecture #design #decoration via @TheBapa@mstdn.social
@aral @TheBapa When I see spikes on seating or benches designed like this, it tells me that the community values not seeing homeless people. Sweep them out of sight. I was homeless for five years and every day I heard the message from my city that I wasn't a resident and should leave. Actually it was more like I wasn't good enough to be a resident of the city.
@patricia_gerstenberger @aral @TheBapa
Different issue. The spikes on benches and ledges are there to keep skateboarders from destroying them with the grinding, sad but necessary.
@aral
matthew butterick has a good talk on good design