FITTING RESPONSIBILITIES
At the kitchen sink, the faucet usually gets the attention. Its curve is considered, its finish debated. Beside it stands a conspicuous vented cap that looks as though it was installed by Josephine the Plumber.
The dishwasher air gap serves a useful purpose: it introduces an external break in the drain connection to help prevent wastewater from backing up. Here in California, the plumbing code requires such a gap to allow effective drainage. Its Gus Plunkett appearance, however, suggests that getting the job done every which way but loose is good enough.
But why should a useful object be excused from further consideration? The sink around it may have been drawn and redrawn. Someone has labored over the thickness of the counter and the alignment of the cabinetry. Then there is the metal cap, sticking up awkwardly from the sink or countertop. What is that cleaner’s hazard, and why must it look like that?
I think that advancing the design belongs among our responsibilities as designers. And that ambition certainly has room for an object as modest as this one. Much of the domestic world we inhabit each day consists of small things, and their shortcomings do not become less troublesome simply because we have grown accustomed to them.
The air gap interested me because it seemed stranded in time, occupying its humble place beside the faucet. I began imagining a soap dispenser in its place, with an air gap still performing its necessary task.
And lo and behold! Someone had already made such a fitting.
Finding your idea in another manufacturer’s catalogue is a sobering cure for the feeling that you might have invented something useful. It is also useful information. The combined fitting existed; so the question became whether there might still be room for improvement.
The product I found came with its own dispenser. Yet soap dispensers are made in all manner of shapes and finishes, often selected to accompany a particular faucet. What if the air gap could accommodate that choice rather than supply another pump to choose from?
I began developing an alternative that would give the air gap a less obtrusive presence and leave more freedom to choose the dispenser. A small change at the sink; but one still worth working through.
Making a fitting less conspicuous than it needs to be does not make this job any the less demanding. It still needs to work, be properly installed, and accessible to maintenance. The mere appearance is where the question begins; the job that needs doing goes beyond that.
The prototype under development involves reworking an everyday fitting that seems to have escaped the attention given to everything else around it. I will continue working through this problem until I get to the point where I can envision it from a different angle.
Every practice encounters such points. A cabinetmaker massages the joint that repeatedly causes difficulty. An architect tussles with the threshold that never quite resolves itself. A manufacturer knows which part makes an otherwise sound product unnecessarily hard to repair. These problems often come into focus through exposition and recapitulation, after the initial pleasure of the design has given way to having to live with it.
Of course, these small advances can accumulate across a community of designers. We have different skills, different interests, and access to different problems. There is room for a great many contributions without agreement on what a chair, a house, or a kitchen ought to look like.
No single designer can reconsider or recalibrate everything. Though there is a great deal we can improve between us, and a responsibility to sustain that effort is part of belonging to this community.
Right now, I am reconsidering the silver cap beside the faucet.
—Micah Heimlich
