The main reading for this week is to do with how the design of everyday things has implications on how they’re used and how the society that uses them is shaped around them. It’s always a weird feeling to have something that you’ve always noticed but never thought hard about pointed out and explained to you, so this week’s text’s focus on affordances – as cheesy as this sounds – really changed my perspective on the world, now that I understand what they are and that they have a name.

Poor design has always baffled me on an emotional level. Like, how ignorant to your own product do you have to be to make it in such a way that nobody can use it? There has to be an unfathomably high level of hubris and corporate “Everything Is O.K.”-ness involved in so many day to day things that just don’t work in the way anyone would expect them to.

I’m reminded of the website layout of the brilliant school that I attend currently. The RMIT website environment is such a mess that I’m surprised anyone is able to do or find anything on it. All information is split between 3 sites; the main public site, Enrolment Online, and Canvas.

The main site is what search engines direct you to, and 9 times out of 10 when you get there it just gives you a messy Web 2.0 screen with a little button linking you to the actual information in a new tab.

In stark contrast to the wacky, bright, almost Splatoon-like design of the RMIT website, Enrolment Online looks like it was designed in 2004 to match design motif with Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM. This is also the part where you find all the information about, you know, you, and all the legal stuff you’d think would be easier to find. I now keep getting emails asking me to finish my application to join RMIT just because I got lost on Enrolment Online once.

Then there’s Canvas, the most functional of the 3, that contains information about your classes and basically nothing else. Having come from high school where Compass contains all of your student information, scheduling, payments, applications, assignments, submissions, class resources, and embarrassing school photos of your friends, the utter disarray of university is a bit of a shock.

Also, the RMIT specific email sign-in page lists the example email as example@rmit.edu.au. Student emails include a “student” after the at sign. Took me a comically long time to figure that one out.