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To me, design in society translates to a tangible, physical, and purposely orchestrated thing that all people are frequently connected to in this day and age, even at this specific second. I thought about things that the average person in America would have.. homes, cars, clothes.. but everything seemed too vague and not a simple design that interests me. I narrowed my thoughts to something that my peers and I use very often, a laptop.

(photo courtesy of http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/06/dayintech_0623/)

Roughly 200 years ago, a man designed a layout for the alphabet that has now stayed on billions of computers worldwide. The QWERTY keyboard was first designed for the typewriter. When Christopher Sholes invented the first modern typewriter, he originally configured the keys in alphabetical order. But as he used the typewriter, the "mechanical bars which struck the paper consistently jammed." (http://www.nndb.com/people/360/000162871/) Because of this jam, Sholes dived in and rearranged the letters so that the ones that jammed the most frequent were furthest apart from each other. This is when the layout of the keyboard that we use today was deemed the layout for mechanical typewriters.

(photo courtesy of http://www.vhxn.com/transparent-keyboard-made-of-glasses/)

Everyone who designs something has a purpose, whether it’s to help with convenience, looks, or to fix a keyboard jam, it’s important to know why and how the original designer intended things to be. Often we overlook the simple objects that we use every day, and if we just “googled” why things look or work the way they do, everyone would have a little more knowledge about the design and designer behind it.