Thoughtless Acts

Poppy Pellereau:
Welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

Jono Hey:
Thoughtless Act is a concept that I think is quite fun to keep your eyes out for once you've got it in your head, what it is.

There's a mug, and what somebody's done is they've wound the end of the teabag string around the handle, it stops the whole thing slipping into your hot water, right?

And of course, the handle wasn't designed specifically for that.

This was an idea of a thoughtless act, the ways that we adapt to the world without thinking.

Tom Pellereau:
I feel like this is basically my job, is to try and look for things that people are thoughtlessly doing, and then work out, is there a better way, an easier way that they could be doing it?

Rob Bell:
Have you ever seen any other incidents of people using your products for something completely different than they were intended for?

Tom Pellereau:
Regularly, because my wife uses the makeup brush cleaner exclusively to clean decorators brushes.

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

I'm Rob Bell, now sadly with only 31 of my own teeth.

Joining me once again with his one massive brain, Jono Hey, and with his two knobbly knees, it's Tom Pellereau.

Good evening, my friends.

Jono Hey:
Good evening.

31 teeth.

I wouldn't have known how many teeth there were as a total...

Yeah, you ask me how many teeth there are, I wouldn't have known.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

32, typically.

Sadly, over the last 12 months, one of mine has been replaced with something not so natural.

Due to, I might add, an unexpected stone in the middle of a Christmas kind of a pair of teeth or nibley things at an event I was at a year or so ago.

Crack.

Jono Hey:
What a pain.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, it was.

A real pain.

How are you guys?

Jono Hey:
All right?

Yeah, very good.

Thank you.

Rob Bell:
This week, we've selected Jono's sketch, entitled Thoughtless Acts, which could easily be taken in a context to describe someone's inconsiderate behaviors, should we say, but that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about ways that we adapt to the world around us without thinking about it.

Now you should be able to see the sketch for thoughtless acts as the artwork for this episode on your podcast player right now.

And if not, you should head to sketchplanations.com and find it there amongst hundreds of others, I might add.

And we'd love to hear your thoughts and any examples of thoughtless acts that you've come across that might become clear as you listen to the episode.

And you can send your emails to hello at sketchplanations.com.

Thank you, Tommy.

Right then, let's get into it.

Jono, now I have to say, I think this one possibly more than any other episode that we've done so far needs a very clear explanation of what it is we're talking about.

Because otherwise, as you mentioned in a brief chat in preparing for this podcast, for recording this, this would basically turn into us just stating things that people do.

Tom Pellereau:
Things that people do.

Rob Bell:
I thought it was a really good observation.

There you are guys.

Strap in, put your headphones on and listen to us talking about things that people do.

And no, so go on, tell us a bit more about Thoughtless Acts and how you came to create a sketch that describes it.

Jono Hey:
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Thoughtless Acts is a concept that I love.

And I think it's a really nice name.

And it's quite fun to keep your eyes out for them once you've got it in your head what it is.

The concept and the name comes from someone called Jane Fulton Suri, who was a human factors researcher at IDEO.

IDEO is a product design strategy consulting firm, one of the biggest in the world.

Famous for creating new products and helping companies come up with the next big thing.

And one of the ways that they did that is by doing research, which is like watching and observing what people do.

And Jane was one of the leading researchers there for a long time.

And she talks about Thoughtless Acts.

She gives, she has a lovely little book, which is very hard to get hold of now, called Thoughtless Acts.

And it's basically just a book full of photographs that she's taken on her research.

And they're really like rough and raw photos.

Like you were walking around to, you commute to work and you just took a photo.

You're like, oh, that's interesting.

And she talks about how she was in Glasgow and she was doing some research in some housing development, which was really not very successful at all.

And she was leaving the development.

And as she was leaving, she saw a bunch of young boys, teenagers, and there was a door, a boiler room door that was open.

And they were taking in turns, climbing up and lying on top of the door, so their tummy's on the door, swinging back and forth, right?

So they're just, here's this boiler room door, it's supposed to just let you in and out of the boiler room.

And they found a way basically to co-op this door, meant for a completely different purpose, for like boisterous, playful fun.

And of course, you move it and it squeaks and you're like, oh, hang on, it's quite interesting that they've taken this thing meant for something completely different and like co-opted it and started to use it for their own purposes.

And it sort of shows you also in that case, it showed us, she was like, well, actually, they're missing out on opportunities in this space for this kind of fun.

Maybe they need some of that.

And here they are finding it on a door and probably breaking the door, you know?

And so, that was just an example.

And where the sort of seed for it came from, she started looking out for this in her research, the ways that people respond or react or adapt to their environment and do things in ways that you don't expect, but may prompt interesting ways to inform design for the future.

The example, which I think, it just shows it so clearly for me, which I did in the sketch accompanied by the text, like ways that we adapt to the world without thinking, is a teabag support, so there's a mug, and you dip your teabag in, but you want to keep the teabag in for the moment.

And what somebody's done is they've wound the end of the teabag string around the handle.

And what that does is it stops the whole thing slipping into your hot water, right?

So you don't have to fish it out.

And of course, the handle wasn't designed specifically for that, nor was the string designed to be wrapped around the handle.

But you can just imagine, you've got this little problem.

I don't want to stand here holding on to this.

If I let go of it, it falls in.

Oh, here's the handle.

I wind it around.

I didn't really think about it.

It wasn't like I sat there and went, I want to solve this.

Rob Bell:
Come up with some genius solution.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I need something to solve this problem.

No, I just was just waiting there and I wound it around and I found it worked.

And so this was an idea of a thoughtless act, the ways that we adapt to the world without thinking.

And there's a lot of small examples I can give about how this might inform your design, for example.

Does that give a little flavor?

Rob Bell:
It really does, it really does.

And I should probably say that it would probably be wise of us throughout this podcast to use examples where we can to kind of illustrate again what it is we're talking about, because there are lots, and you talk about Jane Fulton Suri's book here and that she's got loads of these photographs, loads of examples of this, and you've given two lovely examples already, Jono.

So I would say, boys, let's not be bashful about coming forward with examples that we know of, either from the book or that we've seen elsewhere, or that we might even do ourselves around the home or at work, or whatever it might be.

Yeah.

But that is a good description, Jono.

The one thing I not struggle with, but have to check myself on with this is, is that word thoughtless, and not trying to overthink that too much.

And I guess with the example you gave with the teabag, lovely, you weren't looking for a solution to this.

It was just the stuff that was there, and, oh, yeah, that works.

And I guess the one with the boys and the door, they weren't looking to make a game out of this.

It just, somebody probably just did it for a bit of a laugh, and actually turned out it was quite fun.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And I think there's different degrees of thoughtlessness in this, and different degrees of agency that you actually, and deliberateness to it.

So I give a spectrum on one side of it.

And there's different ways that she divides these up, actually, in the book, which is really nice.

I'll just run through them real quick.

So you might react to the world, you might respond, so you might be prompted to behave in particular ways.

You might co-opt, so like making use of the opportunities in the surroundings, you might exploit some properties of an object, or you might adapt an object, or you might conform to social behaviour, and the last one was signalling.

And all these are all different types of them.

But like they say, on the very thoughtless side, some of the things that you might find yourself doing without really realising it is you're walking down the pavement, and there's like a line of tiles in a row, and you find yourself walking directly down the central line of the tiles, right?

And you didn't really mean to do that particularly, and you weren't trying to do anything.

You were just led to do that.

It was just natural for you to do that.

Another thing that happens, and I definitely see this with a lot of people is if you're walking together, or even light jogging together, very often two people together will just fall in step.

They'll fall in sync in their footsteps as you're walking.

And you don't necessarily deliberately do that.

I don't think you often think, oh, I'm going to match step with the person next to me, so it's somehow a smoother ride.

No, it just sort of happens.

And so I think those are examples on the very thoughtless side of it.

And then you might have some much more deliberate ones where you're like, I actually did have a little problem to solve here.

And I found some way in my environment of doing this.

One of the examples in the book was like a mechanic who taped some instructions to the ceiling.

This is actually, Tom, you do this all the time.

Remember you hurt your back when you were skiing, right?

And there you are, you managed to concoct in your, it was a bunk bed, I think, wasn't it?

Like basically strapping a laptop to the ceiling so you could do your work while lying down and looking upwards, right?

Tom Pellereau:
It's really comfy.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

But it's a great way, like nobody's made a bunk bed laptop.

And probably nobody ever should.

But it was a deliberate way that you designed for that environment.

So that was a bit more on the on the thoughtful side of the acts.

But it's kind of a spectrum there from the lovely, really unconscious reactions to the thoughtful.

Rob Bell:
That's helpful, Jono.

You boys both work in design.

You have designed lots of different things, be they products, services, user experience, whatever it might be.

Do you feel that it's really important to do what Jane Fulton Suri is talking about here in observing and really going out and observing and taking note of how people just naturally interact with things in the world around them as designers?

How important is that?

Tom Pellereau:
I feel like this is basically my job is to try and look for things that people are thoughtlessly doing, thoughtless acts, and then work out is there a better way, an easier way, that they could be doing it?

Because often I think people are doing a thoughtless act because they just don't necessarily realise there's an easier way of doing it.

So filing your nails, my first invention, you know, for hundreds of years people have been using a flat nail file with a curved nail and just having to adapt to the shape with their hand, which is fine on your dominant hand.

But when you're trying to do it on the other hand, it's actually, you know, when you're holding it, say in your left hand, it's a bit more tricky to make it.

Rob Bell:
It's like, well, idiots.

Tom Pellereau:
What about if we made a curved shaped nail file?

And I made the first one in the oven in my flat with our friend, you know, and we've sold hundreds of thousands now.

And it's just a simple idea.

You know, my job is to try and look for these, you know, cleaning makeup brushes.

People have been dunking them in a basin and using soap and splashing them around and then at the end doing a big flick to try and get it out.

And they're still wet and then leaving them by the radiator.

That just how it's been done.

And I was like, well, maybe there's a better way.

And turns out that there wasn't a part of this, I feel is kind of my job.

And also I'm lucky because I love doing it.

Another part of it is the kind of personal hacks that we all do.

I was speaking to someone at work and she's got a dog.

She was like, oh, what?

You mean like, so dog walkers, when we have the dog poo bags at the end of our walk and there's no bin there, what we do is we leave them in the bags and then we hang them on the windscreen wiper that's on the boot.

And then you drive home and then you put it in the bin.

So it doesn't, so the dog poo bags don't have to go in the car.

That's a hack.

There's a lot of thought being put into that, but that's, I suppose, a solution to a personal.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, but it is kind of interacting with that immediate world around you in order to make your life a bit better, I guess.

That's more on the kind of considered end of the spectrum, would you say?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it's considered.

But what you've done is you've taken something in your environment, which wasn't specifically meant for that and made use of it, right?

And there's some examples that, I mean, she has quite a few in her book about the ways people improvise with umbrellas, like somebody's stopped taking a photo and they've hung the umbrella, it's got like a little curved top and they've hung it in a pocket, you know, just while they're doing this.

Other ones that I've seen and I've attempted to do as well is if you go into like a public toilet in a cafe or something and there's no hook for your coat or your bag, I've seen people hang stuff on the door closer device because it sticks out over there, right?

Like, obviously, it's not designed for that at all, but it kind of works and obviously it probably breaks here.

There's some examples like this is the one I probably encountered the most when I think of thoughtless acts in the UK, right?

You more often have side loading washing machines.

Rob Bell:
Front loading.

Jono Hey:
Front loading, yeah.

So you open the door sideways and you pull them out towards you as opposed to in the US, you often have the ones that pull out the top, we have to reach in.

So you pull them out and if you've got a shirt, I often give it a shake and then I'll put it on the door of the washing machine.

And very often, I've actually got like six shirts stacked on the door of the washing machine and I'm like, what I need is a place while I'm still sorting these things to hang these shirts and this door kind of works.

It's probably not perfect, right?

Like I actually think sometime in the future, washing machine makers will figure out, actually the door is just right for hanging stuff and we made the strength of the hinges deliberately so you can do this because there's this behavior that people do because I need to put it and I don't want to put it on the floor because the floor is dirty.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, you know, so I actually think they could put a hanger bar just above the door as well for the small for the socks sort of thing that could then be potentially lifted and moved.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, this is why Tom is an inventor.

I don't know exactly what you do with the socks.

Our socks go on the floor.

Well, that's pretty rubbish.

Yeah, so I think that's a good example.

Rob, I bet, I was thinking of you, you do a lot of DIY stuff, been like renovating your house, you've been in your workshop, but I bet there are a ton of little things that you do in the workshop and when you're doing DIY, which will qualify as sort of thoughtless acts.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, and I was really racking my brains to kind of come up with them.

And I'm not sure I did, because I think that I dismissed them for being too much up the considered end.

I'll tell you what, it does come in.

When you're trying to clamp pieces of woods together so that you've glued for a joint, sometimes it's not always obvious how to clamp them.

And you're just looking around for anything that you can kind of get hold of to kind of balance it and make it work.

Yeah, I'll grab that and this will...

Okay, and I can...

Yeah, you're right, Jono, there's loads and loads.

And I wish I could think up some clearer examples.

And I really tried, I thought, no, they're all too considered, I felt.

Tom Pellereau:
I remember in my office, we put a lovely carpet in the middle, as a kind of, you know, it's nice, sort of slightly soften the environment.

And all that happened is that no one wanted to walk on this carpet.

It was like a sort of matted area in the middle.

And it actually, we ended up taking it away because it kind of caused a bit of obstruction, because we would all be kind of walking around the edge of the carpet to a point where if someone was sort of chatting and their way was blocked, people would almost like jump across the carpet.

Like it was some kind of lake that you couldn't sort of go on, or precious grass that you couldn't touch.

It was so funny and we all ended up doing it and laughing at ourselves going, why can't we just walk across this, the point was it was a lovely bit of carpet, but couldn't do it.

Rob Bell:
I think that's what I find really, really interesting to use this as a designer.

You might think, great, I'm making this, this is how it's gonna be used because that's what's in my mind.

And you put it out and I don't know, you might find that people use it in a completely different way.

You're like, well, why does that happen?

Because you never went out and gave it to people and experienced how they interact with it without any instructions, because people will naturally just shift towards what feels right, what feels good for them.

Tom Pellereau:
On the makeup brush cleaner, we've got these different size sort of rubber attachments so they can go with different brushes.

And I'll never forget seeing a YouTube video where someone had put the biggest one onto the device and then they'd nested the smaller ones inside it.

Rob Bell:
Have you ever seen any other incidents of people using your products for something completely different than they were intended for?

Tom Pellereau:
Regularly, because my wife uses my makeup brush cleaner exclusively to clean decorator's brushes and she has a glass bowl that she uses and she's like, Tom, it's brilliant.

It's really, it's really good.

Rob Bell:
But then this is interesting because that could then as a designer, Tommy, could you use that example and that observation in remarketing or redesigning or repurposing that invention and that product?

Tom Pellereau:
And it's absolutely my job is to look to see how people are using it and potentially improve our communication as to help people to use them more as we design, but also enjoy when people are using them differently.

And then as I say, finding new market opportunities or new problems to solve.

Rob Bell:
So then I come back to this question about how important this concept of thoughtless acts is in the process of design.

And Jono, have you had examples within the design work that you've done?

And in my mind, I'm thinking more around user experience of websites and services, which you've done a fair amount of.

Tom Pellereau:
I have.

Jono Hey:
I was going to think of the digital world, but the first examples that came to mind were the physical world, with projects I did previously.

Rob Bell:
OK.

Jono Hey:
And I'll give an example.

Rob Bell:
Because they're fun.

I find these really fun, really satisfying when you see something that someone's done that makes it work for them better.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I mentioned we did some work around storage and organisation.

And one of the things that you see very quickly, if you watch people coming home, is you walk in the door and then you've got loads of stuff to deal with.

And if you've got kids, they just like, strew them all over the floor, right?

Tom Pellereau:
They walk and dump.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, there's bags and coats and shoes everywhere.

And so, I remember we talked about this idea of the landing zone.

So you're coming into the house and I've been moving, I've got all this stuff and then you need a really easy place where everybody knows, this is the place that my bag goes and it's really easy to put it in here.

And everybody's got their own place.

The shoes go here, the hooks are at the right height so the kids can actually reach them.

Because otherwise they put, very often, kids show you what is going wrong because stuff is not made for them, you know, they put their coat on the floor because they can't reach the hooks, you know, that kind of thing.

So simple things like, oh, actually, we should lower the hook.

I think strollers or pushchairs are quite a good example of this.

If you look at really old pushchairs for kids, there's a couple of things, there's a few photos in the book, we've got this pictures of us in pushchairs as kids, and they're the same classic old ones, and everybody's hanging stuff on the handles.

You've got like all your shopping bags on both handles of the thing, and then actually they become quite unstable because they're like really back heavy.

And then the kids are also quite low down in those.

And so if you watch your adults are always stooping to get down, and also conversations are happening up here and the kids are missing out down below.

And so what's happened partly with a lot of pushchairs and strollers is the seats have got higher to bring the kids a bit more into the action.

And also they actually respond to like places to store your stuff.

What you're doing as like a parent is you've got all sorts of bags and kids run off to the play area and throw you your coat and you need a place to put it.

And so now there's like lift up the kids and you can put stuff underneath them.

And those are good examples, I think of ways that things have evolved where you're like people would just make and do, they were hanging stuff on the handles because that's all there was.

But now it's much better, it's much easier.

Coffee mugs and shopping trotters.

In America, coffee holders everywhere, right?

Coffee cup holders.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
So you get the supermarket, there's a coffee cup holder and there's also the same with the shopping list.

Like how they have like a little place to, everybody's carrying a shopping list around and there's nowhere to put it.

You put it in the end of the shopping trolley.

So now you can clip your list and you can put your coffee in the holder and take your time over your shopping.

Rob Bell:
But where there isn't one, people continuously find novel ways of something or somehow holding their coffee cup.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, or they like put the coffee cup under their arm and they don't stay as long in the shop because they can't do their shopping.

Sometimes these things are quite hard to spot and it's not obvious that somebody's making do because it looks like they're just holding their coffee.

But as a result, they're picking everything up in the shop with one hand, which is difficult, or they had to put the coffee down by their feet, that kind of thing.

So not always obvious to spot.

Rob Bell:
As designers, how conscious are you observing people's interactions with stuff on a daily life in order to inform the work that you do?

Or is it just something that you subconsciously do now because you've been working as designers for so long?

Tom Pellereau:
I suppose in some respects, I could ask you the same about presenting, TV presenting.

How much is conscious, but also how much do you watch TV and look at the presenter in a different way to how we are probably looking at the presenter and thinking, how many times did he have to edit that?

I wonder what angles they took that from?

I wonder how he chose the script.

Rob Bell:
It absolutely ruins watching TV for me, but more importantly, for whoever it is with watching TV, because I will tell them.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, exactly.

Rob Bell:
But you're right, Tommy, that's a really interesting point.

And because, I mean, we're straying away a little bit from thoughtless acts here, but I think it's an important point to make about just how important our observation of our world around us influences our own activities, be it consciously, subconsciously, professional, social, whatever it might be.

Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
And depending on your job and your expertise probably really reframes what you look at.

Like, you know, if your job is a plumber, you look at the house in a very different way to other people.

If you're a teacher, if you're a bus driver, if you're a lawyer, we all...

And then there's the question of how much of that was learned on the job, how much of that is intrinsically you.

Jono and I as designers, yes, I imagine, I'm not Jono, but spend all our time looking at how people use things and thinking about it and going, oh, that's interesting.

I wonder how we could improve this or that or t'other.

By looking at things that are different.

For example, the dishwasher is not a product that I'm involved with, but I would love to get involved one day because for some reason, well, no, we all thoughtlessly act as we put our dirty dishes on top of the dishwasher.

They just put them on top.

All of us, we do it, don't we?

We don't put them in, we tend to just put them on top, especially children, they always put them on top.

It's like, okay, well, that's not in, but it's helpful that it's there.

But what if putting it on top was putting it in?

Or the one that I really want to do, my dream kitchen, would be, I spend my life putting stuff into the dishwasher and then taking it out when it's clean and putting it away and then taking it out that clean cupboard to use.

It's like, why aren't all my cupboards, why aren't all my cupboards dishwashers?

And when I put, like, or you have two dishwashers where you have the clean one and the dirty one, and if you want something, you go to the clean one to get it out, and if you've got dirty.

Rob Bell:
I've heard you say more than any other, it's surely there's a better way to do this.

Jono Hey:
I definitely don't think, you know, it's not confined to people.

This is all of us, right?

Like, how many times have you locked your bike to a signpost that happened to be there, or a railing, which was meant to do something completely different, right?

Not for locking bikes on.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Like, you just do these things all the time.

I was thinking, I don't know how I even thought about this one, but I was thinking, if you're digging in the garden with a fork, and you've finished digging, what do you do with the fork?

Tom Pellereau:
You use it as a rake.

Rob Bell:
You lay it up against something.

Jono Hey:
I do.

I would do all that, is I'd stick it in the soil and stand it up.

Just like if I was using a spade at the beach, you finish the spade, you stand it up.

It's like, you just do those things.

Rob Bell:
You just do it, yeah.

Jono Hey:
And she talks about in the book, one of the concepts of affordances, which I did a sketch on recently, which is just the ways you can use an object.

So it affords that you can stick it in things.

And so people do that.

So like, you know, the classic example is with a door, if it's just got a flat plate, you can only push it.

But if it's got a bar, you can push it or pull it, and that can confuse people.

So we find different things that we can do with objects than you didn't expect.

I was thinking of like, if I have a book, people like fold the corners of a page to keep their page.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Or I regularly use like a boarding pass as a bookmark, you know, that kind of thing.

Rob Bell:
Yes, this was one that I came up with, Jono, the number of times it's a boarding pass or a train ticket as your bookmark.

Jono Hey:
Absolutely.

I was thinking cables comes up all the time.

How do people manage cables?

Because cables are just a big pain.

Tom, can you fix cables?

Tom Pellereau:
Elastic bands is how I do it in the tin.

But yeah, it's a pain, aren't they?

No cables is the solution.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

No cables is in fact the solution.

Get rid of the cables all together.

I was thinking like if you mow the lawn, you probably wound the cable around the handle of the lawnmower just to keep the cable out of the way once you weren't using it.

And same as like, what do you do with your headphones cables?

Or you got a plug, you wind it around the plug when you're trying to put it in your bag to take it places.

All of us are doing this.

If you find a glove, a lone glove on the street, you might pick it up and put it on a wall.

Some obvious place for people to find too.

Tom Pellereau:
And flat surfaces.

I find if there's any flat surface anywhere in a house, it'll always end up with loads of stuff on it.

And I've noticed how in bars and public places, and especially gents toilets, they always put all the surfaces at a slight angle, so you can't rest stuff on.

So there's litter, and in the, oh my gosh, my parents' house, any flat surface just always ends up with stuff on it.

I'm sure your parents, Jono, are saying books.

Jono Hey:
Our house.

Tom Pellereau:
Your stairs.

Your parents always put the books on the stairs, don't they?

It was a flat surface, isn't it?

So going up and down the stairs at Jono's parents' house, there would be piles of like three, four high piles of books on every step on both sides.

It was kind of cool.

It's really cool.

Rob Bell:
There will be interior designers after that kind of look now.

Jono Hey:
If you go to a National Trust house, one of the ways they often do is they don't want you to sit in the seats.

So they put like what's called a teasel, which is like a dried flower with a spiky top.

And you just put this delicate teasel and sit it on the cushion of the seat.

Rob Bell:
Okay, nice.

Jono Hey:
It's a very effective, subtle deterrent to stop people sitting down.

Like in order to sit down, you need to move this thing because A, it'll break and B, it's uncomfortable.

And so you don't sit there.

And all they've done is put this nice flower on the seats.

Tom Pellereau:
I love those sort of simple solutions, like using your mouth to hold stuff as just as a third hand.

Like the whole time shopping lists, phones.

From COVID, you're always very much discouraged from using your mouth at all, but behind their ear or...

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I thought you were going to say that with the DIY, Rob, actually, putting the pencil behind your ear.

Rob Bell:
And not just pencils, you know, little screwdrivers, pencils.

Yeah, it's really, really, really handy.

Jono Hey:
You see people dealing with their phones at the gym and you kind of like stuff it down the side of your shorts.

And now they've made like...

Tom Pellereau:
Jogging pads with them, yeah.

Jono Hey:
With the side phone pocket, which is, I think, a nice, simple example.

Rob Bell:
But right now, I've got my thickest book from my shelf underneath my microphone to bring it up to the right level.

Yeah.

That just works.

But one I used to do in my car was, it was a car that didn't have its own sat nav.

And so you'd use your phone, but you want it in a position so you can see it.

And I didn't have a phone holder that you kind of put on the windscreen or whatever it was.

But the steering wheel was the perfect shape and size between the top curve of the steering wheel and the middle bit in the console.

And it's all rubber and it's got a certain amount of flexibility, so you kind of wedge your phone in there.

And it was absolutely perfect.

It was always in front of you.

Jono Hey:
When you turn a corner, it goes upside down.

Tom Pellereau:
Well, yeah.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Hang on.

Tom Pellereau:
Hang on.

Jono Hey:
Turn in your head.

Rob Bell:
Oh, I got too early.

I enjoyed that one for a while.

Jono Hey:
One that if you're a man, you might relate to is the urinal etiquette, which is a somewhat thoughtless act.

It's like you're just responding, which was like, if there's five urinals and somebody's at the middle one, which one should you go to?

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
And you probably don't go to the one where you're standing right next to them.

But people are sort of making these decisions.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
As you go in, which one are you going to?

One of them is we prompt to behave in particular ways.

So we respond.

So I was thinking a couple of things, which I do a lot, which is when you run a tap, this is something that people have responded to.

You don't know what temperature the water is.

And so the first thing that you do is you put your hand under it.

Tom Pellereau:
Flick.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Until it's hot.

And of course, sometimes that backfires because it could be scalding, right?

But that's how you do it.

And of course, it's really rubbish with a shower because you turn on a shower and you don't want to get into a shower until it's warm enough.

And then my parents have a shower, you press a button and the lights flash until it goes to the right temperature.

And it tells you it's the right temperature before you get in.

But I think otherwise, you know, we just naturally, you know, this is what I have to do.

And you might not, you might not design anything for that, because you think that's just what you have to do.

Or you might go, oh, look, everybody has to test the temperature of the shower with their arm before they go in.

Maybe we can make that easier.

Can I give you your example?

So there's a whole category we haven't talked about very much, which is she talks about signaling, which is we we do think somewhat unconsciously as messages and prompts for each other.

I guess I've said putting the glove on the wall is a little bit of example.

Rob Bell:
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jono Hey:
So one of the ones that I've found myself doing sometimes or something is like if you go to a public toilet or something and it's out of paper, but there's a you don't want somebody to go in there and use the toilet and then realize there's no paper.

So what you might do is you take the take the roll, put it on the seat down and you put it on the loo as like this is the signal.

And there were lots of signals like that.

You know, like the teapot is finished in the restaurant.

So what you like turn the lid upside down.

And that's like the recognized signal that teapot is empty.

Rob Bell:
So would like putting your knife and fork together on your plate at the end of the meal signify, I'm done.

In the UK, I know in America, you put them opposite sides.

Is that kind of commander is a signalling thoughtless act?

Jono Hey:
So I think so.

But obviously, some of these are like culturally learned, right?

Rob Bell:
Yes, yes, yes.

Jono Hey:
And yeah, that is knives and forks together is like, oh, I'm finished knives and forks diagonally.

It's like, oh, I'm still going.

But you might have, I don't know, some more subtle ones you might like, I've seen in a bar, if this beer tap is empty, you might put a cup over the top.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, you see that loads.

Yes, yes, yes.

Or they turn the sign for whatever beer that is.

They turn it around the other way.

Absolutely.

So that brilliant thoughtless act is like, right, what have we got?

And that it's become kind of internationally recognized, well, nationally recognized in the UK, I could say.

Oh, they're out of that one.

Jono Hey:
Absolutely.

So if I was making those taps, I would probably make it so that the back said something good instead of just empty.

Rob Bell:
Oh, what a great example that is, Jono.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

Moving us along a little bit, I was listening to a lecture that Jane Fulton Suri, who we're talking about throughout this episode, was giving, and she was talking about her backgrounds and a job that she'd had, whereby she visited victims of accidents with tools, you know, hand tools, power tools, to understand what had gone wrong and then worked with the tool manufacturers to improve those certain features of their tool design.

And there was one example she's talking about with a particular manufacturer of chainsaw, and the accident happened because the operator was holding the, I don't know if you've used a chainsaw, but you've got a kind of guard that protects your hand.

But actually the way it was designed, it felt better and was a lot easier to hold the guard.

It was better weighted that way.

Wow.

So then, but by holding the guard, then you obviously have nothing to guard your hand.

So then she worked with the manufacturer to improve that.

And along that train of thought, it kind of struck me that the health and safety executive would surely have hundreds of examples of various individuals' thoughtless acts when it came to tools and accidents and all that kind of thing.

I mean, I've got a friend who recently put a chisel through his hand because he was using it to open a paint tin.

You know, you put it in there and you're holding the paint tin with one hand and it's just there waiting and it slips, bang, jab, it goes through.

People use screwdrivers, people use all sorts.

But you can now buy paint tin openers.

But, you know, it always seems a bit like, well, I don't need that in the workshop for me.

I'll use the screwdriver.

But, you know, it's a thoughtless act.

Jono Hey:
Paint tins could do with some work.

I think I mentioned it once before, called functional fixedness, which is like things having a specific purpose.

And so you only use it for this.

And there's some really cool experiments about it, of how fixed we are that a screwdriver is for screwing things, not for opening paint cans.

But actually it works quite well.

And some people just figure out different ways of doing it.

I think kids are brilliant at this, because they don't really have any of that fixedness.

And I was thinking of like, you know, like the swinging on a gate one is way back to that.

Or like, you know, you put some bollards and they're really fun to jump between.

I was thinking parkour, right?

The parkour is just like, it's just the world.

But I'm leaping around and this is an amazing playground.

Like people improvising with, oh, I get stuck opening this paint can.

So I always use a Bloomin screwdriver.

And no wonder I hurt myself, because it's not made for that at all, you know.

Rob Bell:
That's the first time we've used the word improvising in this podcast, which it strikes me that that is basically what we're talking about here, improvising with the world around you.

A lot and a lot of these examples.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it's an interesting one about like, when you're trying to do research, like you say, with a power tool accent, because you can't easily like be there, be there to observe it when there's when there's an accident.

Yeah, nor can you necessarily know that people are obviously using something in a dangerous fashion.

So there, you're like, you have to balance the observation with the appropriate questioning, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Yes, which is why I was so impressed with this, with what I heard from that lecture that Jane was talking about.

I thought that was a really impressive and very insightful way to go and gather data and evidence in order to inform your work.

I thought it was very, yeah, very impressive.

Jono Hey:
She's a pro.

Rob Bell:
What else would anyone like to bring to the table on this week's topic before we round out?

Tom Pellereau:
Just a quick note.

In this episode, we've talked quite a lot about product design, which is quite a small niche of what people do.

I wonder if we can try and find ways to inspire ourselves, our listeners to think of ways that they could use this in their life to either reduce the irritations like kids just dumping their things on the ground, or maybe look for those things that are happening and go, well, how can we stop them happening by doing something good?

Rob Bell:
Tommy, can I just clarify here?

Are you offering up a surgery to our listeners for them to send in their problems and you come up with a, well, have you thought about this?

Because that is what you do.

Tom Pellereau:
Well, I would very happily do that.

But I think it's very important to say that a lot of the examples that Jono and I have mentioned about product design and coming up with ideas and that sort of thing, this is a very powerful concept, this thoughtless act, and we can influence things around us to encourage certain behaviours to happen that we would like to happen, and maybe certain behaviours that we don't like to happen.

Rob Bell:
Well, Tommy, I mean, I absolutely agree.

And if any of you, our lovely listeners out there, have got examples of thoughtless acts that you've seen, or ones that you've created yourself that you'd like to share with us, then please do, we'd absolutely love to hear from you.

Email those in to hello at sketchplanations.com.

And we can put it to Tommy to see if he can better your design solutions.

Because in his words, this is what he does.

This is what he does.

And we'll pick out the best ones.

We'll pick out all the great ones and we'll go through them next week.

That'd be brilliant.

Yeah, we'd love to hear from you.

Well, listen, I don't know about you too, but I am also gonna be on the lookout over the next few days for thoughtless acts because I'm gonna find it really, really fun.

I wish I'd kind of learned or knew of this ages ago because I'm sure I would have built up a whole bank as Jane Fulton Suri has done in a fantastic book.

And I guess Jono, would you advocate if you can get your hands on it, just to have a flick through, then do so?

Jono Hey:
It definitely helps, but I have to say, unfortunately, I think it's quite difficult to get a hold of it.

But if you see one, yeah, take a look through it, it's brilliant.

Rob Bell:
Lovely.

It was a lot clearer than I thought it might be when we started.

And that's very much thanks to Jono's knack for explaining things in a very simple and clear to understand way.

For this sketch, that's it.

Thank you all very much for listening.

Go well and stay well.

Goodbye.

Jono Hey:
Cheers.

Tom Pellereau:
Goodbye.

Poppy Pellereau:

Thanks for listening. See you soon.

Rob Bell:
All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.