the toa podcast hall of fame - 99% invisible (check cashing stores)

Today's inductee may feel familiar to longtime readers - I wrote about this podcast in 2017. The point of the story is explained on the 99% Invisible page for the episode, which also provides a link to a related article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine back in 2008. The casual first glance may suggest that the episode is a story painting check cashing stores in a previously unacknowledged positive light. The title of the article referenced above, "Check Cashing, Redeemed", certainly supports this initial conclusion. However, the reason this episode has stuck with me for so long is a far simpler universal observation - design is either inclusive or exclusive. This aspect of a building, organization, or system is particularly challenging to understand for anyone within the included group, so I consider this an important podcast episode for the way it forced me to recognize this design feature within situations where I was previously oblivious to it.

The bank is just one example of how this plays out in everyday life. The more amusing example I can think of is a conversation my friend had with his then sixteen-year-old brother, who was several years younger than us. One night, the brother asked my friend - how does a bar work? The fact is that a bar works a lot like dining out at a restaurant, but if you think about it the way a restaurant operates isn't very obvious to an outsider, either (and that's before we think about tipping). The contrast of how a bar or restaurant operates in comparison to fast food outlets is the crux of this idea. Isn't the process within a McDonald's obvious the moment you set foot in the restaurant? I can't speak for everyone, but I know that it made sense to me when I was seven. 

The reason I like this episode is because once this main idea got into my head - design is either inclusive or exclusive - it became hard to look at situations without thinking about how to apply the concept. I was just in a situation this week where a realtor was refusing to show apartments in-person until a prospective tenant had filled out a preliminary application. The situation, viewed through the lens of this design concept, could be either inclusive or exclusive, and it would depend entirely on the realtor's goal. If the idea was to maximize the number of potential applicants, then I think this is a foolish approach because increasing the amount of preliminary work is going to discourage some interested prospects from moving forward (like me). On the other hand, if the realtor wanted to limit showings only to prospects of a certain standard, then this approach will help keep people who have no realistic chance of being accepted from seeing the apartment. These kinds of considerations underlie all manners of mundane situations - the job search, the entryway of a restaurant, the layout of your yard on Halloween night, and so on. The right answer to the question of using inclusive or exclusive design varies by the situation, but if you don't have the consideration in mind at all times then I'm certain you will find yourself making plenty of avoidable errors.