Problem Displacement

Definition

"EACH SOLUTION IS THE SOURCE OF THE NEXT PROBLEM." Problems, solutions, and new problems form "an endless chain," and one common way this plays out is problem displacement: a designer or fixer relocates a problem into someone else's "back yard — or back end" rather than eliminating it, often without noticing. The displaced problem lands hardest on whoever didn't participate in the original decision and therefore has no way to flag the mismatch — what the book calls a misfit, "a solution that produces a mismatch with the human beings who have to live with the solution."

In the Book

An engineer designs an aluminum bar with pins to punch precise reference marks on printer paper — an elegant fix for a measurement problem. Nobody anticipates that the tool, stood on its "legs" instead of its side, will punch two accurate holes into a Section Chief's backside; the fix is ground-off semicircular legs that make the dangerous orientation physically impossible. The book generalizes: designers, like landlords, "seldom if ever experience the consequences of their actions," so they continually produce misfits — illustrated by the decades-long gap between inventing the disposable safety razor blade and someone finally inventing a dispenser that also disposed of used blades, during which millions of users cut their fingers and simply assumed it was their own clumsiness. The national 55-mph speed limit is offered as a case where a solution (fuel conservation) exposed a previously invisible misfit (accident rates tied to speed) that had gone unnoticed for years. The prescribed defense is to deliberately seek fresh eyes: "TEST YOUR DEFINITION ON A FOREIGNER, SOMEONE BLIND, OR A CHILD, OR MAKE YOURSELF FOREIGN, BLIND, OR CHILDLIKE" — exemplified by listing ten inconveniences of an ordinary book's physical design once you deliberately adopt an outsider's viewpoint.

Why It Matters

Any fix implemented by someone who won't personally live with its consequences is at high risk of silently relocating the pain rather than removing it — and the people who inherit it usually can't trace it back to the "fix" or don't have standing to complain. Deliberately adopting an outsider's, novice's, or impaired person's viewpoint before shipping a design is a cheap, repeatable way to surface these misfits while they're still easy to correct, instead of waiting for a disaster or a lawsuit to raise everyone's consciousness of them.