The Library of Unwritten Books is "an art project travelling the UK, ... collecting stories and ideas for books people would like to write - but never have, and probably never will."

In Full Disclosure, a review of The Jewish Museum Berlin, the reviewer asks,

“What role does design play in the illumination of a history many might prefer to ignore? To what extent can or should it deliver painful or damning information without making the experience glamorous? How might it render such a break with civilization, making it both believable and memorable?"

When I first read those questions, I thought, “Design can do that!.” But then, as the review progresses, I wonder if design is up to it:

"How to explain the myriad oddities of the JMB exhibition—the digital pomegranates, kosher gummy bears, synagogue building blocks, and nap corners; two hundred young “hosts” deployed to usher visitors through the building and the insistent labeling that “explains” the architect’s intentions to the presumed confused (the voids are, for example, “Architect Libeskind’s way of recognizing that the destruction of European Jews in the Holocaust has caused an absence, or void, in German and European society”); the unseemly detours into irrelevant political correctness, like the tree to which you are meant to attach your answer to the question “What do equal rights mean to you?”

And in this moment, I can see the designers sitting around excited yet daunted by their chore: how do you get people to feel the way you want them too, how do you get them to actively participate in a space devoted to one of the worst crimes in history? Maybe the designers should have asked if visitors would be up to actively participating in such a creation (I have a feeling a tree on equal rights wasn’t the way….)

I can remember a moment where the world spit into two for me; the created world and the born world. I was 18 and on a tour of the Kansas City Art Institute, and we entered the design building. In the hall was an exhibit of student work-- the usual, toasters, silverware, books, etc. Upon seeing these mundane objects I suddenly realized that everything around me had a human being behind it. Not just the student-built toaster, but the case that held it, the wall that held the case, the linoleum under my feet the shoes on my feet my jeans, the cat-eye glasses on the woman explaining why the school was a good investment, the brochure in her hands, everything. Everything until my eyes fell on the trees outside the window.

And even though I choose fine art (perhaps partially because of the strange repulsion of that moment where my world felt horribly wrongly artificial) I never lost that consciousness. I never lost the awareness that not only was everything man made, but that someone sat down and puzzled over how it was made. Some designers talked to users, some did not, some sketched, some imagined, some copied, some innovated but there was always a human just like me deciding.

And now, after some years as a designer, I feel vaguely embarrassed when I see something and feel the designer's struggle. A good design feels much like a tree. You forget that a designer was there, and you don't consider it any more or less than a landscape-- it's beautiful or it's ugly-- but not "What were they thinking?" It’s much easier to be in the world when you don't feel reminded about someone's sweat, worries, late night and struggles. Better to enjoy the apparent effortlessness of Google without knowing there are five people on the first result team.

So as design and designers take on work that touches our humanity, be it museums to the holocaust or designing the ground zero site, I think perhaps we need to shake off the feeling that we are “doing important work” because that makes us self-conscious and awkward. All acts of designing the world are important, and need to be approached with the same attention. Having gained awareness of the designed world, we have to protect others from that upsetting sensation. We should remember the real design work is done internally by the visitor to the museum, or the user of a website, and our job is simply to give them a decent place to have that experience. Our designs are enabling, not dictating.

If you put a fork in your mouth and you are conscious of it rather than the food it carries, it is a bad design.

At the Hotel Lucia, one can order a pillow to one's liking. Let me repeat you can order your favorite kind of pillow!

After shower quality, I think a bad pillow is what makes me saddest as a hotel guest. Oh, and bad sheets. and crappy mattress. and not enough blankets. and no clock. and old air conditioners and... hmm. A lot can go wrong in a hotel. Bad wall art is low on the list for me, after many creature comforts including a decent pillow. But having a pillow I'd like was one of the things I had given up on (I like very flat pillows). Imagine my delight when I saw the sign.

I'm happy to say that the Hotel Lucia offered

• drinkable coffee
  
• comfy mattress with enough blankets/pillows (plus hte mind-blowing option of ordering a pillow)
  
• windows that opened, and a functional thermostat
  
• lovely decor, including orginal signed photographs
  
• a proper cd player and a big TV
  
• wireless phone
  
• shampoo and conditioner (I hate hotels that punk out and get that conditioning shapoo. it doesn't condition and it doesn't clean well)
  -- and it was some of the best smelling shampoo I've ever had. Aveda rosemary-mint.
  
• BATHROBE!
  
• king size bed.
  
• gorgeous chrome ice bucket and both highball and wine glsses.
  and much more.
  

I highly recommend you stay there if you are ever in Portland as a guest, but I especially recommend it for you experience designer types.

But moreover, it's a good example of ways you can find to delight people, if you just question every single aspect of the experience...

A particularly good JOHO this month, especially for the category inclined.

"Aristotle's answer is that those aren't separate questions. If you're going to exist, you have to exist as something — a table, a human, a piping hot souvlaki. That turns philosophy back from a bad course that it had embarked on, and to which it would return as the influence of Aristotle wore off after the Middle Ages: Thinking that the meaning of things (the table as a table) is separable from their existence (the table as a thing). That path leads to the trivialization of meaning. But not for Aristotle. For him, if you want to know what makes Socrates real, you have to see how Socrates is a human...which means understanding him within a category (animals) with differentiated sub-categories (the rational animals as opposed to the non-rational ones). Thus, taxonomy and existence are fused: To be is to be in a taxonomy of meaning."

Every once in a while it's nice to know that one is not just making products easier to find, or adding business value, but perhaps even making the world saner and more palatable.

That's not even the bulk of it; most of the JOHO is about the three orders of order. It's a very IA issue.