Reprinted – The Observer (London), copyright 1997

Uncommon Sense – November 10, 1997

Who’s the Boss: The chair or is occupant? Do we program computers, or do computers program us? In a thousand subtle but, powerful ways the designs of everyday objects structure the lives of those who use them. And increasingly scholars of material culture are studying not just how people design objects, but how objects design people.

Sometimes we don’t realize how much certain objects shape our minds-and even our bodies-until we encounter people who are used to a different way of life. For example, writes Edward Tenner, “Europeans and Americans occasionally are disconcerted to see Asians, individually or in families, sitting in airports or even at urban bus stops, preferring squatting or other ground-level positions to standing or raised seating.” This, he suggests, is because “Western technology, with its operatives seated at everything from farm tractors to computer terminals, seems a functionally chairborne way of life.”

In two recent essays in The Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Magazine, Tenner describes how the chair, “apparently so natural, turns out to be one of our most complex, and least understood, technologies.” For one thing, far from being ubiquitous, chairs have infiltrated non-Western cultures only in the past few centuries. Tenner argues that symbolic value, not convenience, accounted for their rapid spread--especially in countries where they supported the rumps of imperial colonizers.

“The high-backed chair of authority, like certain stiff hats and formal shoes, produces effects in the user no less than in the beholder,” he writes. Elegant, incommodious 18^th-century chairs encouraged sprightly salon wit; overstuffed 19^th century ones made conversation ponderous. “Neither authority, nor conversation, nor wit is the object of today’s chair,” Tenner adds. “It is the manipulation of symbols on cathode ray tubes.”

Chairs manipulate our bodies even more insidiously than they do our minds. Chair sitting, Tenner writes, is responsible for most lower-back pain; it puts about 30 percent more load on the spinal column than standing. Yet people used to chairs find it painful to squat or to sit cross-legged: “In our posture, culture choices become biological facts.”

This isn’t such an uncommon phenomenon, Jared Diamond suggest in Discover. Once a new technology has been widely adopted, it can be extraordinarily difficult to dislodge—even if it’s later proven inefficient. As his example, Diamond looks at the QWERTY typewriter keyboard. This familiar arrangement of keys, he writes, “condemns us to awkward finger sequences” and to frequent alternation of hands. It need not be thus. Ever since the invention of the typewriter, there have been dozens of keyboard designs, including the Dvorak, which allows twice the speed and half the errors.

Yet August Dvorak died a better man, having failed to persuade typists to adopt his keyboard. His failure, Diamond suggests is due to the phenomenon of arbitrary technological commitment.

Qwerty was the brainchild of Remington engineers who in 1847 decided to encourage typewriter salesman “to show off their machines to prospective buyers by typing to word typewriter very quickly (all the letters were now in the same row).” Because generations of typists have grown up with Qwerty, we’re stuck with the design, even though its original justification has long since vanished.

It’s easy to forget how even the most basic fixtures of everyday life reflect the choices made centuries before. Some fundamental objects have been designed quite differently in the past. In Places magazine, Diane Favro writes that while today’s toilets are thrones of privacy, in ancient Rome they were “among the best appointed, best situated and most frequent places in the city for socializing… Roman latrines boasted open, group seats that accommodated up to twenty-five people at a single sitting.” Game boards were sometimes etched in the space between stone seats; visitors could sit for hours talking politics or angling for a dinner invitation. A modern American might find the Roman latrine rather unpleasant; an ancient Roman would probably find our bathrooms a little lonely.

Its takes centuries to change bathroom habits, perhaps. But when a brand-new technology crops up, we have an opportunity to decide how much we want to adapt to accommodate it. Donald A. Norman suggests that when it comes to computers, we may be giving an invention too much power over our lives. Our difficulties with computers, he writes in Technology Review, derive from the fact that humans and computers must communicate with one another, but they think in different ways. The predominant response has been “to make humans more like computers” by forcing them to use precise language and to enter information without making a single error.

Meanwhile, Norman argues, computers-despite hype about user friendliness-remain “technology-centered,” presenting more options and requiring more decisions than necessary. “We should develop more systems that rely on the complementary properties of people and machines,” he suggests. “We need a different breed of designer, one less immersed in technology and more focused on the people the technology is intended to serve.”

History suggests that whatever design choices we make, they will have unexpected reverberations, affecting not just the way we live but also how we think about ourselves. In Assemblage, Henry Urbach examines the history of closets, both as spaces and as metaphors. Before the 1840s, clothes were stored in furniture or on hooks. Then, as Americans and Europeans embraced a new, more private and individual sense of identity, modern closets were invented. The closet became a place to conceal the clothes you weren’t wearing and later-metaphorically-the sexuality you weren’t revealing.

“Form follows function,” Louis Sullivan famously wrote more than a century ago. Recent observations suggest that-though the process may be more subtle-things just as often work the other way around.