by Joe Miller
Can a building be an accomplice to murder?
That’s the surprising question that sits at the heart of Lee Goldberg’s “Murder by Design,” released on Monday of this week.
Goldberg’s latest series introduces detective-turned-insurance-investigator Edison Bixby.
Bixby is a wildly, deliberately over-the-top character. We first meet him as he arrives at a posh hotel, where a celebrity chef has just been murdered. At this stage, Bixby is an LAPD detective who has solved every case he encounters. He’s the guy other detectives call in when a case is too tough.
Bixby steps from his Bugatti, dressed in a perfectly-tailored Tom Ford suit. He solves the murder almost offhandedly, though he is far more concerned with the hotel’s poorly designed light switches than he is with the murder.
Goldberg – a long-time television writer and producer for shows like “Diagnosis: Murder” and “Monk” – is no stranger to unconventional detectives, and Bixby sits comfortably in that lineage.
Bixby is obsessed with design, which he variously refers to as the “built world” or the “manmade world.” Built objects, Bixby explains, have particular affordances, “affordance” being a term designers use to describe the properties that suggest how a particular thing can be used.
On a website, for example, a button is an affordance. Website buttons use various clues (colors, subtle shadows to indicate depth) to signal that users can click to make something happen.
Affordances aren’t properties that a thing has directly – there is no “pressableness” property in a website button. An affordance is a relationship between the object and its user. That relationship emerges from a combination of features that the designer gives the object.
If you’ve ever gone into a hotel bathroom and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to make the shower work, then you understand the importance of affordances. It should be obvious how to work a shower. If it is not, then the shower is poorly designed.
Bixby takes this basic insight and turns it up to 11.
His schtick is looking at a crime scene and inferring the set of affordances that allowed the specific crime to take place.
These days, every brilliant, Holmesian detective needs some sort of defining quirk. Holmes himself had a cocaine addiction. Monk has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Bixby has a traumatic brain injury which leaves him compulsively rude.
That trait opens the door for Wally Nash, who serves as both audience surrogate and as Watson to Bixby’s Holmes. Nash, a struggling actor and aspiring novelist, who to this point is best known for starring in pharmaceutical ads for mostly embarrassing medical conditions, serves as Bixby’s reverse anger translator. Nash’s job is assuaging hurt feelings in the wake of Bixby’s chronic rudeness.
“Murder by Design” is a cozy homage to classic detective fiction. Readers who find the grittiness of Goldberg’s Eve Ronin novels off-putting should find the Bixby novels more to their taste.
Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” isn’t mentioned explicitly in “Murder by Design,” but it looms large nevertheless, a silent background character that informs much of Bixby’s thinking.
Norman – a cognitive scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego – published what has become his best-known work in 1988.
Norman’s book was the first to apply the idea of affordances to designed objects.
Affordances, Norman says, are one part of a well-designed system. Other parts include signifiers, feedback and conceptual models.
A signifier shows users where an action is meant to take place. The brass plate on a door that is meant to be pushed open is a signifier.
Feedback describes how a system responds to a user’s actions. A message saying, “Thank you for your submission,” when you complete an online form is an obvious form of feedback. Subtler versions include the audible click when a manual seat adjustment locks into place or the small vibration your phone makes when you long-press a key.
And conceptual models describe how people think about a particular object or system. Our conceptual model for the flow of information moves left-to-right and top-to-bottom. A system that doesn’t work that way – one that breaks our conceptual model for information flow – ends up being confusing.
Norman – together with Jakob Nielsen, a PhD researcher in human-computer interaction – pretty much invented the discipline of user experience design, a practice that has in turn shaped all of the (so very many) digital products we encounter each day.
As someone who earns a living helping people build digital products, I’m a big fan of Norman’s work. But I like Norman’s book as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does.
I think Norman indirectly articulates one of the key differences between art and design. Good design needs to be intuitive. It should be obvious how to use a thing. It should not disrupt my conceptual models.
But Bixby isn’t quite right to apply Norman’s framework to the entire built or manmade world. Some made things are designed. Others are art.
Art surprises us. It addresses that which is not obvious. It questions our mental models. It asks us to rethink our assumptions.
Design helps us to do the things we need to do to keep ourselves alive and healthy and generally comfortable.
Art reminds us that there is a difference between living and just being alive.
