Thoughtless acts reveal just how natural it is for everyone to design, modify, and rearrange the world to make it work better for them. We draw on that capacity everyday in our quest to create useful products and services for others.
I took this picture in the San Francisco airport. Airport lounges are shared places where you're invited to make yourself at home temporarily. I love watching how individuals and groups position themselves to take personal ownership of space and make it work for them by creating boundaries and surfaces with whatever is on hand. This heads-up newspaper display system was a clever repurposing of roll-aboard luggage that I hadn't seen before. In one elegant move, this traveler has provided himself with an information screen (the bottom half of a page anyway), hands-free support to read in comfort while eating his cereal, and a clear delineation of personal space and visual privacy.
Jane Fulton Suri is dedicated to sustaining and evolving design insight and inspiration. A pioneer in the practice of human-centered design, Jane authored "Thoughtless Acts?" in 2005 to encourage greater awareness of intuitive and ingenious ways people interact with the world around them.