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Who Designed This Crap? The Case of the 11 Pound Pencil

Barry Gerber

March 5, 2006 23:17

The Decision

I'm an equal opportunity cynic when it comes to the design of anything from computer hardware and software to automated business systems to the bathroom in my condo. I hate bad design with a passion both because it's always counterproductive and aesthetically disturbing. My family will tell you that my favorite question is "Who designed this piece of crap?" Today I'd like to discuss the 11 pound pencil.

I have a friend who works for a non-profit social services agency. She spends most of her time in the field interacting with her clients and patients and their care givers. In their very finite wisdom her agency and the government entity that funds her program have set very high case visit bean counting standards and designed a pile of paper forms she and her coworkers have to fill out. The forms are better thought out than the performance standards, but both suffer from what I like to call the "hello-do-you-guys-have-any-idea-what-I-do-every-day?" syndrome. Or, to putting it another way, managers are so removed from what the people they manage do that they sometimes come up with the craziest ideas about new things for those they manage to do.


In the past my friend did her job, took notes in a spiral notebook and then came home and spent another 2-4 hours filling in the forms by hand. Non-profit jobs don't pay enough to justify all these extra hours, but she felt she had no choice. When I first heard about all of this, I asked her as you might have guessed by now, "Who designed this crap?" My next question was "Can't you complain to anyone?" My friend's answer: "Not if I want to keep my job."

Well, it turns out that, in spite of my friend's feelings about ratting to someone, others in the agency weren't so timid. And that's how some of my friend's bosses - there are always multiple bosses in dysfunctional agencies - cooked up the 11 pound pencil. Without much though at all they decided they needed to provide their social workers with portable computers.