Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss

Author:Henry Dreyfuss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: e9781621531500
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2003-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

In spite of what I have said here, the automotive design world is not all wilderness. Raymond Loewy’s first postwar Studebaker was a car that reflected its honesty, and, as I see it, has led the whole industry several steps along the path toward intelligent design.

WHATEVER their appearance, automobiles have crowded into all our lives, creating problems far beyond the length of the wheelbase in a dealer’s showroom. They have become a mixed blessing. A person can drive on good highways from coast to coast, from border to border, and see the cities, the mountains, the deserts, the rivers—the glories of America known previously only on picture postcards. Autos are a godsend for persons living in isolated places and an irreplaceable convenience for those in widespread metropolitan areas. But they have also become a menace. With each new car on the highway, a new hazard is created. There is no longer any such thing as absolute safety, only comparative safety.

In 1953, 38,300 persons were killed and 1,350,000 injured in auto accidents in the United States. In the three-year Korean war, there were 25,604 battle deaths and 103,492 nonmortal wounds. The Korean war is over, but the highway slaughter continues year after year.

The blame for this carnage must be placed partially on cars that are too fast and powerful in the hands of reckless or inconsiderate drivers, but also on inadequately planned highways and the nerve-racking congestion of our city streets. The great freeways and turnpikes that crisscross the country and slice the cities are triumphs of engineering and a great boon in unscrambling traffic congestion, but they can also be as deadly as gunfire. They are responsible for a condition known as highway hypnosis. A motorist with his eyes fixed on the unchanging road ahead, listening to the monotonous drone of his engine, can go into a kind of trance. Unless his attention is diverted, he may lose his sense of proportion and collide head-on with an oncoming car when he unwisely tries to pass a slower-moving car. Or he may smash into the slower car ahead, and in an instant a dozen speeding cars may telescope into each other. If it were not so full of horror, such an accident would have a comic-book humor.

Someday cars may be equipped with a radar device that will warn drivers of the proximity of the car in front and even automatically decelerate their engines. Until then, other devices must be found to forestall highway hypnosis. Advertising billboards have been criticized off many roads, but they do break the monotony in a horrible sort of way. Large beds of colorful flowers or flowering shrubs or groves of trees, which could be illuminated at night, are a good equivalent. An occasional piece of sculpture or a quarter-mile-long picture wall graphically highlighting the history or major occupation or scenic beauty of the area would also afford relief. Various colors might be integrated into the surfacing of the highway, or the texture of the road might be varied to give a change in sound as the tires rolled over it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.