NORTHERN PLANNER

The very first patent for a typewriter was given out in the 1860’s for QWERTY keyboard. It was specifically designed to make people type slowly, ensuring the commonest letters were scattered around the left hand side to confound the majority of right handers.  thus avoiding keys jamming by being too quickly. It became so entrenched that the computer keyboard layout is pretty much the same.

We tend to think that technological progress follows logical, well thought out directions when things nothing to do with usefulness and purpose influence how things are designed and how they get used.

On the other hand, texting was never designed to be the massive success in messaging it has. Users showed designers its real worth. The best ideas rarely survive contact with the real world.

That’s worth thinking about next time you insists that an ad needs to have just one ‘verbal message’ or look at what advertising to get advertising inspiration.

Agencies are amazingly conservative for ‘ideas companies’. Most practices have kind of ’emerged’ – we just assume we’re doing the right thing.

Here’s a last thought – apparently aeronautical engineers have calculated that an aircraft with one wing swept back and the other swept forward would actually be better than conventional bilateral wings. Imagine the faces of passengers getting on that plane……….