If you’re a practitioner like me, you may appreciate this post where I am connecting the dots between household efficiency and practicing our craft. In the end, it’s worth asking the question: ‘is it resistance or is it poor design?’
The thought occurred to me when I saw the new laundry boxes that my wife had bought last week, or better: how it instantly changed the way our family started to about with the laundry. Before we installed these separate boxes (see picture) there was one large laundry basket. And it didn’t occur to us that we could improve the trouble that goes along with that: the laundry piling up, most of the laundry was poorly targeted at the basket, and the sorting of the laundry that was postponed until the basket exploded because it feels like such a drag …
In a certain sense I had taken these circumstances for granted and I had labeled the laundry activity as a drag.
The first thing I noticed in our behavior as a family is that the boxes almost literally catched our attention because each box is intended to sort the laundry according to color or type. Later my wife discovered that the volume of one box is exactly the volume of one washing cycle.
All of a sudden the our inconsiderate and uninterested acts of poor aiming were transformed into pleasant puzzle to solve for each piece of clothing we held in our hands. The kids loved it.
This goes to show that how we design an environment can really influence the behavior and that what we often label as ‘resistance’ may just be the result of poor design from our end. Therefore I beg the question: which part of our projects are we currently labeling as ‘resistance’, but are actually the result of poor laundry basket design?
