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.
@aral It's interesting to see the original post of this image that just basically says "look at these book benches" and the replies say "wow" etc, then your exact same image with different framing and the replies say "how terrible"...
@tomw Don’t forget that the goal is to deceive people (“look at how nice it looks, don’t think about anything else”) so we can’t really blame the people who get deceived. They’re victims too. If, once they see – or are shown – what lies beyond the aesthetic, they are appalled, that’s because they’re basically good people. And we should celebrate that :)