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Rightweight2

weight in design: experience, meaning and belief

MADE Forum at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining28 February 2011

Report by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

What is the enduring fascination of the guess the weight of the cake contest? This reliablestandby of village fetes has the power to floor everyone. Should an expert physicist orpsychologist try their luck, the chances are they will find their guess is just as far off as onemade by an experienced chef. Even the person who baked the cake can find themselveswide of the mark.

Its not as if a cake is a difficult object to assess. We can see its dimensions. We can

be pretty sure it is of relatively even density throughout, even if that density can vary from alight and fluffy angel cake to the richest of fruit cakes. So the problem is not complicated ordevious. Its simply that we are bad at judging the weight of things. Very bad.

The ice-breaker for this event, the second Rightweight workshop, came in the form ofan opportunity to guess the weight not of a cake but of a range of objects from boots to atoaster. You could even pick them up. But even with this supposed help, the results from asample of designers, materials scientists and others in a better position than most to make ajudgement showed an extremely wide range of variation.

The reason for presenting this challenge was to highlight the importance of weight inproducts. Weight influences utility, consumer appeal, material and energy resourceconsumption, and sustainability and recyclability. Some of these factors seem to argue formaking things lighter, but as designer Geoff Hollington explained in opening the day,lightweighting isnt always the right answer. He recapped the background to the firstRightweight event, held in November 2010, also at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and

Mining. The idea for the event had been to focus on making things lighter in weight until itwas realized that there were often important countervailing reasons for things to be heavy.For luxury brands, we accept heaviness, Hollington observed. We dont expect to seeChanel No. 5 sold in a lightweight bottle.

Nevertheless, it seems to be lightness that is on the side of the angels. Following aThree Bears Trail at that first event, people were asked to assess if a range of objects weretoo light, too heavy, or just right. More than half of the items were judged just right (goodnews for designers). The more interesting finding, perhaps, was that of the remainder, morethings were judged to be too heavy than too light (by 59 to 41 per cent). This prompted SarahWilkes, the anthropologist at University College London who analysed the data, to wonder: Isthere some underlying moral imperative towards lightness?

Morality and meaning

The consequence of that first event was to raise awareness that weight is central both to theactual usability and sustainability of products but also to the complex ways we perceive themas consumers. This opened up the subject into broader territory to do with the morality andthe very meaning of our objects. A carbon-fibre car, for example, might be less damaging tothe environment, and the lightweight material might be strong enough to keep us safe. Butare we going to feelsafe in car where the door no longer shuts with a solid-sounding clunk?There may be a moral or ideological imperative among designers and engineers to developever lighter materials and products certainly the gravity-defying designs shown by materialsexpert Chris Lefteri argued eloquently that there is. But at the same time there is our sense,expressed in the dictionary definition, that lightweight still means lacking seriousness, depthor influence.

Rightweight2 was an attempt to shed light on these complexities by calling in

expertise from the fields of physiology, psychology, cultural studies and anthropology tocomplement the understanding of designers and materials scientists, while not becoming soacademic as to lose touch with the real world of products, selling and consumers.


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and permanence, sometimes even in the same class of objects. They suggest too thatpresent moral preoccupations with achieving lightness might not be so fundamental as theiradvocates think.

Designers showing off?

Mark Bond, the head of design for home products and furniture at Tesco, began with a storyof gift exchange that was perhaps not so different from these exotic societies. Asked by afriend to buy a Breitling watch on his behalf as he passed through the airport duty-free shop,Bond naturally tried the watch on. He found to his surprise that the expensive Breitling feltcheap and nasty compared to his own stainless steel watch. The reason was that it was farlighter, being made of titanium.

Bond appreciated that, in the proper context. coming from a maker of precisioninstruments for marine and aviation navigation, the lightness of titanium would be counted asa plus. But within the context of conventional luxury gifts, weight is important. Ironically,Breitling acknowledged this by packaging the watch in a stout leather box which in turn washeld in a wooden box, the two boxes together greatly multiplying the weight of the watch itself something that Bond was forcibly reminded of as he dutifully carried the watch with him onhis flight to deliver to his friend.

Bond was sceptical about the merits of lightness for its own sake. Showing a varietyof high-tech designs, ranging from a long, unsupported table by Jean Nouvel to nearlytransparent bone china, he asked: Why does a chair need to be so light? Theyre just waysof the designers showing their intellect and technology. This was perhaps a painful level ofhonesty about how design may be truly regarded for a room full of designers. But are suchcreations just a way of showing off? And if so, is that a reason to despise the results?

It may be. Bond elaborated: Some of our customers would think some of theseobjects are cheap. The psychological association of lightness of weight with cheapness orpoor quality is even more important in the mass market than in elite sectors. This pungentobservation hinted at thorny matters of taste and consumer education. Add to thesecomplications the reality of todays retail market where customers will buy even major itemsof furniture online, sight unseen. Here, the question of weight becomes one of striking theright balance between how solid the item looks in the selling photograph (which mustnt betoo seductive) and how heavy it is in reality, in order to ensure that expectations arent

disappointed on delivery.An exercise soon demonstrated that we are all subject to these feelings. The

audience was asked to compare two cosmetics products from which the branding had beenerased. Only one displayed the price; the task was to guess the price of the other from theperceived quality of the product and its packaging. People were generally able to tell correctlythat the mystery product was more or less expensive, but they did not go far enough injudging the differential. For example, a shampoo was judged cheaper than the control pricedat 5.81; the consensus guess was 3.00, but the actual price was 81p. Conversely, a facecream was judged from what could be seen of its packaging as likely to command a pricerather more than the 5.10 of the control. Respondents guessed 12.99, but the real priceturned out to be 35.75.

The illusions of weight

Something of the puzzling logic behind such decisions was to be revealed by the nextspeaker. Alan Wing, professor of human movement at the University of Birmingham,introduced the idea of weight not as mass times acceleration due to gravity as we are alltaught in school, but as illusion. We do not weigh objects in a balance before picking them up(off a supermarket shelf or anywhere else). We use our perception to judge the weight rightly or wrongly. This then informs the muscular action we use to grip and lift and thisaction is adjusted by our motor system as the lifting continues. An object will require greatergrip to lift it not only if it is heavier, but also if it hard or smooth, for example.

Wing asked the audience to rank by weight a series of four boxes of equal size butdifferent colours . Most people ranked them correctly, even though their weights were quiteclose. The twist was that two of the boxes one light grey, one dark were of equal weight,yet respondents tended to rank the dark box as the heavier of the two. In addition to thiscolour-weight illusion, there is also a size-weight illusion, whereby we tend to assume a largerobject is actually lighter than a smaller object of the same weight. This illusion persists even


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when you know about it, said Wing. These tests serve as a reminder that vision can easilyoverride information gained from the other senses.

When we pick something up, the squeezing force we use to grip it increases in directproportion to the force needed to lift it. This is not so surprising if it didnt, heavier itemswould just slip through our fingers. What is more surprising is that the time our motor systemtakes to calculate the grip and lift forces is no greater for the heavier object. It is a relatively

constant fraction of a second. Since this time is also presumably the time in which theconsumer is making the decision as to whether to buy literally weighing it up it ought to besomething designers and product manufacturers are more aware of.

Charles Spence then enriched the mix still further. Professor of experimentalpsychology at Oxford University and director of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory there,Spence set out to show that it was not only our sense of vision that could cut acrossjudgements made by other senses. The senses traditionally the five of sight, hearing, touch,taste and smell, but many more according to some beliefs are usually considered inisolation. Were interested in their interaction, both at the level of the single cell, and how itcomes together in the brain. Can you taste the weight? for example. Or how does thefragrance somebody is wearing affect your estimation of their age?

Such questions are relevant, said Spence, when companies are competing to sellproducts that are in practical terms virtually indistinguishable. Only a few companies are asyet alert to the possibilities. One is Bang & Olufsen, whose cast aluminium remote controlunit has a satisfyingly heavy feel in the hand compared to plastic ones an example of whatis sometimes called tactile branding. Likewise, heavy wine bottles may be a factor inpersuading consumers that the wine they contain is worth more. Scarily, it has even beenshown that job interviewers can be persuaded that a candidate is more serious when they(the interviewer) are given a heavy clipboard to hold rather than a light one.

In terms of products and packaging, Spence observed, people like heavy, but oftennow know that light should be preferred. How can knowledge of the way all of our senses areinvolved in perception help square this circle? One could, for example, look at new surfacefinishes that can be smooth or slippery. Does making things easier to pick up make themmore appealing? Maybe. But its certainly not that simple. As Spence pointed out, results ofconsumer research suggest that it may be hard to make rapid progress, so ingrained are ourpatterns of perceptual judgement.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator in design and science. His has curatedexhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wellcome Collection. His latest book,Periodic Tales, is published by Penguin.

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