The importance of small things
I was reminded of how much of an impact small things can have on your life after I started using a new water bottle last week and saw my water consumption drastically increase. This lesson was one of the first things that I internalized when I started studying design (and it probably goes without saying that it’s generalizable haha)— habits , physical objects, aspects of the environment, etc. can all have seemingly disproportionate effects, and not just in an emergent/gestalt sense. For instance, there was a housing project in St. Louis known as Pruitt-Igoe that turned into a crime hotspot and was demolished around 20 years after completion, despite a ton of public enthusiasm and optimism for the plan. There were a bunch of factors that contributed to its decline, but one of the dominant ones was a design decision that had an unexpectedly large negative effect: to reduce elevator congestion, the elevators only stopped at certain floors, forcing residents to use the stairs in between c