Cycling jacket affordance
Posted: August 14th, 2010 | Author: ktcita | Filed under: Affordances | Tags: affordances, cycling jacket, zipper | 2 Comments »My cycling jacket has sleeves that are detachable via zippers. The designer has cleverly made it so that it’s impossible to switch the left and right sleeves when putting them back onto the jacket. The way they’ve done this is to have the head part of the zipper on the body on the right hand side, and on the sleeve on the left-hand-side. You can never put the sleeves on the wrong side.
Nice! If I remember correctly, what you’re discussing is actually the true meaning of Murphy’s Law (as opposed to the one about everything going wrong), namely that if there are two ways to put something together, a person will always do the wrong one, so therefore objects should be designed to only have one way to work. USBs (and maybe even the good ol’ Zip disk) work the same way.
interesting, I hadn’t realised that about murphy’s law, thanks