Design Legacy

In a previous post on Design I touched on the fact that we live in a world by design where everything around us that has been manufactured was designed, right down to the T - literally.  Building upon that post I would like to point something out, and that is design legacy.  What this means in practical terms is that many forms of modern design have come about through two things, firstly tradition and secondly the fear of change.

As you sit at your computer reading this I would like you to take a moment and have a look at your keyboard.  It's layout and the characters that appear on it.  If you are in an English speaking country the top line of letters will most likely read QWERTY and that name is most commonly used to refer to that keyboard layout.  Now if you don't know your history of the design of keyboards then allow me to explain the strange positioning.  Decades ago when the first typewriters were created the lettering at first on the keyboard was simply ABCDEF, that is the letters were in alphabetical order.  Typists using the typewriters found their speed increased to the point where the keys would frequently jam, in order to prevent this designers took the layout of the keys and moved common letter pairings further apart so that the speed of the typist would be purposely reduced.

Today of course we can type just as fast on a QWERTY keyboard as anyone could on an alphabetical typewriter and we don't have any issues with keys jamming as modern keyboards use circuits.  So why do we still have QWERTY keyboards?  Well as stated before for two reasons, firstly tradition, it has always been QWERTY so few companies deviate from it, and secondly change is feared, most companies would rather not change the design for fear their product might not be embraced.  There are of course alphabetical keyboards that you can buy.

These again are not that popular and never gained the momentum to overtake QWERTY.  It stands as a demonstration of the legacy of design, we don't always choose the best solution to our problems, more often than not we choose the solution that follows tradition and avoids change.