I’ve been designing for most of my career and much of it as the Design Director of The Wall Street Journal Online (1995 – 2008). I designed (with a dream team) WSJ.com, the first successful paid online news publication. We were envisioning the future form of The Wall Street Journal and it was clear to us that future was online and we had to work hard to prove it to the board and other c-level executives.
One of my design tenets is “design is about paying close attention to one’s surroundings and empathizing with it.” I followed this one tenet when designing for subscribers of The Wall Street Journal Online and in doing so I was able to exploit the strengths of the Internet to provide a valuable experience to WSJ.com’s readers and add revenue to my employer.
Recently, I have broadened my reach when thinking about design. I’ve been trying to connect to experiences which have negatively impacted someone’s life due to poor design decisions. This approach has expanded my vision and made me much more critical of all types of experiences both online and offline. One in particular resonated deeply within me.
In August of this past summer, Mr. Krishna Jayaraman died in a hit and run accident which occurred five miles from where I live in NY. The New Canaan Patch reported that:
“In a scene reminiscent of the movie "Crash," the lives of Kate Regan, 32, and Krishna Jayaraman, 82, and their families, collided when the car Regan said she was driving hit and killed Jayaraman as he was collecting the mail in front of his son's home on Oenoke Ridge. The accident happened on the afternoon of Aug. 18, close to the border between New Canaan and New York State. “
As a designer with empathy for both sides of this tragedy, I immediately saw fault with the experience of getting one’s mail in residential neighborhoods. Although the United States Postal Service standards calls for a residential mailbox to be set back 6 to 8 inches from the front face of the curb or road edge to the mailbox door, one actually needs to stand in the road to open the front of the mailbox. Unfortunately, The USPS standards favor the US Postal drivers. The 6-8 inch setback is to ensure that an average human arm will reach the mailbox door from the mail truck on a road. It does not take into account the mail recipient, a human being, perhaps a bit too young or old standing in the road to get the mail.
I felt for Mr. Krishna Jayaraman, Kate Regan, their families, my wife and kids and everyone who stands in the road to get their mail. From my perspective, I felt that that this tragedy could have been avoided had Mr. Jayaraman been standing on the curbside and not the road. Yes standing on the curbside getting one’s mail is very doable, had the mailbox been designed with a back door. This isn’t brilliant, hard to do or even novel, but it is very much needed in redesigning mailboxes if we care to save lives.
See my photograph of the prototype I created from two classic metal rural mailboxes. I’m calling this classic rural mailbox The Krishna and giving some of the proceeds of the first 24 hand built versions to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. It is an independent, publicly funded, 501 (c)(3) charitable research and educational organization established in 1947 by the American Automobile Association. The AAA Foundation's mission is to prevent traffic deaths and injuries by conducting research into their causes and by educating the public about strategies to prevent crashes and reduce the impact when they do occur.
I plan to complete the first 24 Krishna Mailboxes by March of 2011 and display them at Weed and Duryea for the New Canaan community to ponder how we can design better mailboxes to save lives.
