3rd July 2009

I've been reading Alain de Botton's The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work recently. In it, de Botton visits people in their place of work - accountants, biscuit manufacturers, rocket scientists, painters and so on - and watches what they do for a living. One of his conclusions is that people of all grades and in all industries take their work more seriously than the job would suggest. Even though we don't really think about how important the output of their work might be (compared to a brain surgeon, doctor or fireman), to someone what we ignore, is their work and the focus of their day.

De Botton takes, for example, biscuit wrappers. A team of people are employed to make the best possible biscuit wrapper - they make decisions on material, colour, font, logo, number of biscuits contained therein, based on lots of research and design. They know that a good wrapper will help sell more biscuits than a bad wrapper and so de Botton says that every thing we buy and use has been made by groups of specialists whose job depended on designing, making and producing even the tiniest part of the finished product. Packets of biscuits don't look like that by accident. They appear by design.

It always reminds me of the smiley face on my electric toothbrush. According to OralB, you're supposed to brush your teeth for 2 minutes. Once you reach the two minute mark, the toothbrush vibrates and a little smiley face appears on the screen.

It's a nice touch and totally un-necessary. It would have been perfectly logical for the clock simply to register two minutes and no more. But thinking about what de Botton learned, it's feasible to think that a team of people in the OralB HQ must have made a pitch to the toothbrush manufacturing committee to add the smiley face to the display. Maybe they even did some research to analyse the cost-benefit analysis of adding the smiley face (as opposed to another picture, or no picture at all). They will have drafted in some outside consultants to make recommendations on the best picture - a smiley face is, after all, logical for a toothbrush. A smiley face is also text shorthand for happiness. Software engineers would have analysed the cost of adding something to the screen and sat down to design how to make it work. The pitch of the smile, the thickness of the eyes - all deliberate business decisions.

I've no idea who did all that work, but I'm pleased they did. More products should have little smiley faces on them. So, this week, I'm going to try to find nice pieces of design as a way of thanking all those anonymous, hardworking people.

:-)