Design in Holland

I am in Amsterdam for 2 nights and on this trip I have realised a few more things about the design here.

On my last trip here about a month ago I noticed that many systems are rather open, more so than in many other countries, with the expectation that people will find a good solution and use it instead of having to follow a strict set of rules. Now obviously this has advantages if done well because it means more things are more intuitive to do if things have been made "open" properly.

I think it is often considered the case that less confined things tend to succeed more often or at least have serious advantages that lead to a market share.

I should note that despite there being a lot of really well designed open systems in Holland I think they just have a lot of trouble with information systems even when they have obviously had the crap designed out of them. Perhaps this is a cultural thing but I have found on a number of occasion that there is not a lot of consideration for real users. One instance was in a parking lot payment system where almost every user I saw firstly did not understand how to use the machine and then when they thought they did it still seemed not to work properly.

So, on this trip I think I realised there is more to the multitude of open systems here than simply making things more intuitive. Having spent a significant portion of my time on this trip looking at architecture here in Amsterdam and also in Utrecht, I have realised that though may people live in apartment blocks and many apartment blocks are similar there is a lot of subtle work done to make apartments dissimilar. The way this is done, a block of several hundred apartments may be made up of something like 10 different apartment types each with a few subtle but noticeable differences. In many places it is common to have 2 or a few more types of apartments making up the core of the block because of the symmetry about elevators etc.  Here in Holland buildings are usually not so tall and people are less lazy so there are stairs. So yes 10 different sets of 10 apartments scattered around a building so each has a unique view and has unique value. The reason, I think, is because of the perceived value of being personally unique. So now I think, though I could be totally wrong here, that in Holland there is a strong value associated with being unique. Of course there are lots of social norms and people tend to be similar as people are in most places of the world, however I think people here really like the idea that they could do things specifically how they wanted, and see things in a way that suits them.

I think this is really different from the perception of uniqueness that is found in many Americans as here it is based on actual interactions and systems built to provide for them where in the USA it is much more based on personal claims and perceptions.

This does not explain the multitude of really badly design information systems but it does give me a lot more context to watch the way people do various things. I know this is just an assumption but I have not seen any contrary evidence as far as I know.