On the design of kidney failure

I found him 🥹 . I found the dumbest man in existence. It's the moron who designed these restroom symbols at the Norte shopping mall in Porto. What a legend...

In a rush, I couldn't quickly ascertain if this one was for the men's room, it the women's room. It didn't occur to me that it is, of course, for the disabled.

You see, people who use restrooms in shopping malls are not great at semiotics. Nature's calls lower the IQ by up to 52%.

If you look at the comment, you will find the image that they used for the men's room. Side by side, it's very clear what each means. This reveals an important property of information that we tend to skip when building our information systems.

In a system, the attributes of an object sometimes don't fully describe what the object is. Some of the properties are understood only in reference to the other objects.

For instance, if you have a checkbox to offer breakfast at your hotel checkout, that means that your offer doesn't include it. But if checkboxes for both lunch and dinner, that might suggest that breakfast is, indeed, included.

Another example: If you have a 50% sale banner on your website, and an item has 30% off, that means that the 50% doesn't extend to all items. This piece of information is not encoded anywhere, but it is still part of the system. Whether or not you can get it is a different topic.

Datapoints about an object are not necessarily included on the object itself. They are often inferred in relation to other objects and interactions. That's what makes a system so... well, systematic.

Designers naturally like to make maximum use of this property of systems. It allows us to slim down or saturate our objects contextually to tell stories or improve aesthetics. But we have a bias towards reduction because we like subtlety and we think we're so clever. This tends to fail as objects move and are shown in different settings.

Other people, namely those of the German conviction, like to go the opposite way. They like to include everything about everything everywhere at all times. This also fails, because redundancy renders things invisible, and it creates a false promise of completeness that can't be fulfilled.

Unfortunately, as with every boring thing in life, moderation is the only way forward. We have to cultivate our sense of judgment into a reliable decision-making tool rather than working exclusively with systematic analysis.

Our friend here takes the crown because his designs made sense side by side in Illustrator. However, when shown separately in 3D space, to a person with an urgent predicament, they required too much attention to be functional. They failed.

Consequently, they left one petty Tunisian designer wrestling with impatient urges as a crowd of consumerist women stared him down with firey disdain and disapproval when he ventured into their facilities looking for answers.

Lesson: Bad design causes kidney failure