When staying on the top floor of a structure in Amsterdam, a city of dense, vertical urban planning, naturally, the fire alarm is an important object. The fire alarm in my current living environment is located to the right of the sink at eye level, which led me to think of the design of the fire alarm each time I was washing my hands. My ruminations about the fire alarm related to both psychological reactance theory and methods of designing for interaction.
Psychological reactance theory suggests that individuals who encounter people, ideas, and rules that threaten behavioral freedoms are motivated by an adverse emotional response. Put simply, reactance states that when someone is specifically asked not to press a button, they will naturally want to press that button more. This is how I felt staring at the fire alarm, which seemed to mock me with not one but two arrows pointing to where the user is intended to press. Although my conscious self, informed by my experiences and past teachings, knows I shouldn’t press the fire alarm if there indeed isn’t a fire, this in itself makes me question what the experience of pressing the fire alarm would be like even more. As an industrial designer, I want users of my designs to actively want to experience using a product. Is it possible that in some circumstances, and perhaps for a brief amount of time within a user journey, the best way to make users excited about a product is to not let them use it? Reflecting on this question causes me to think about clothing brands with highly anticipated “drops” and extremely limited inventory. Perhaps building anticipation or clout for an object is counterintuitively found in having users significantly experience the absence of the object prior to its acquisition.
In addition to reactance in relation to design, I was captivated by the Dutch fire alarms as they mechanically vary dramatically from American fire alarms, which commonly work using a lever mechanism which can be pulled to trigger the alarm. When I first looked at the fire alarm, I thought the black circle was a button. However, further investigation led me to discover that the graphic of the fire alarm is a label that is adhered to a glass plane. Dutch fire alarms function by having the user press on a glass plane which will crack and trigger the alarm system. This method seems impractical for many reasons. Once the fire alarm is used and the glass plane is cracked, a replacement must be installed. This predicament is not only less sustainable than pull mechanism fire alarms, it’s also less practical. What happens if someone needs to trigger the fire alarm before a replacement glass plane can be installed? When I went to a website selling the replacement glass panels for the fire alarm (za.rs-online.com), they were on back order and would only be dispatched starting on 6/27/22 if purchased on the 21st. That leaves a week (at best) for a fire alarm to be fully functional after use if a building doesn’t have a replacement panel. As someone living on the top floor of a building, that’s not an ideal scenario. This caused me to reflect on my role as a designer to anticipate issues. When identifying the best design solution, it’s essential to not only contemplate the form and function of the object itself within the context for its intended purpose, but also how users will interact with the object in each state of its existence. In this case, a designer should question, how easy will it be to install the alarm? Will it be intuitive to trigger the alarm? Who will be marginalized from the characteristics of the alarm? Individuals of a certain height, or with certain visual or dexterity abilities? Will it be a relatively quick process to replace the alarm to a functional state after it’s used?
Aside from the mechanical properties of the alarm, I started to question aesthetic choices that were made. My first thought of the aesthetics of the alarm was, why is the circle not red? My second thought was, why are there two arrows pointing to the circle, and why are they the same size, even collectively taking up more visual space than the circle? An important framework designers use is the concept of visual hierarchy, which is founded in Gestalt psychology, which suggests that aesthetic elements in a visual field tend to stand out to viewers, therefore creating a visual hierarchy. Designers can use visual hierarchy to their advantage to create intentional designs that feel intuitive to use. This is especially important when creating products for users in stressful and fast-paced contexts such as needing to use a fire alarm. It seems peculiar that the circle, the most important visual element as it is where the user is supposed to press, is not significantly high in the visual hierarchy of the alarm. Although I will admit that its centered placement certainly causes the viewer to see it first, I would also argue that a variation in color or scale would add further emphasis and therefore provide a better product.
In addition to fire alarms, I aim to continue exploring how objects I encounter in Amsterdam are designed, for better or worse, and how I can utilize my findings to improve my own design approach.