Kate Canales

Kate Canales is a designer, educator, and Professor of Practice in the Department of Design at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Design and Creative Technologies. A former IDEO product designer and frog creative director, she co-founded TWOxTWO and focuses on human-centered design, design research, prototyping, collaboration, and everyday systems shaped by human behavior.

Handwritten Instructions Have Become a Second Layer of Public Design

Designer Kate Canales argues in a TED talk that handmade signs taped to doors, elevators, bathrooms and payment terminals are not just evidence of failed design. Drawing on more than 20 years of photographing improvised instructions, she treats them as a second layer of design: small interventions by people who noticed confusion and tried to spare the next user. The signs, in her telling, reveal both the limits of everyday interfaces and a durable human instinct to make public systems more usable for strangers.

TEDMay 18, 20265 min read