TUQUES AND HOODIES—-SOLUTIONS TO AN IMPORTANT DESIGN PROBLEM. Back in the 90’s I listened on NPR to an interview with an important designer who impressed me with a number of ingenious design solutions to problems that I had not previously realized were design problems. At the end of the interview, he was asked to name a design problem that had not been solved. To my surprise, he named men’s winter hats. He said that in winter on very cold days you saw most men walking around bareheaded. He had been unable to come up with a solution.
At the time I was one of those men.
I was in New York City recently and saw a lot of men with two kinds of head coverings: tuques (stocking caps) and hoods and hoodies. I was wearing a tuque.
Did he describe what he saw as the design problem in men’s winter hats? Or did he just imply that there had to be a design problem (or several) because the evidence was that men weren’t wearing hats in the cold?
What if the thing preventing men from wearing winter hats isn’t an issue with hats themselves but the prevailing societal attitude of “men must be strong and stoic”, leading me. To want to show their strength by not admitting to being bothered by the cold?