Emotional Design

[Martin Cassini]

In Emotional Design, Donald Norman writes: “The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products are the same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.” - Our road network expresses the precise opposite of emotion. The public realm is where human beings live and interact. It is the mark of a country's civilised values. Yet we have abandoned it to technocrats who, Dementor-like, destroy its soul. They turn it into a concrete jungle where we have to fight for survival, gaps and green time, where pedestrians are herded into “pens”, and where road safety is the responsibility of children! You see them being shouted at in infancy by parents who inherit the unreasonable burden of drumming into their little heads the age-inappropriate notion that just the other side of that grey thing called a kerb, on that grey thing called a road, lurks danger and death. The road isn’t even a different colour to help them. I spit on a system which turns our roads into rivers of death for innocent humans. There is a better way. It doesn’t involve technocrats. Just a change in culture and some emotional design.