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The Axe: an object lesson in design
Getting a grip on real-world tools can provide valuable design lessons.
As the autumn begins to hint at its colors where I stand in the Northern Hemisphere, I check the woodpile and sharpen my axe. It’s been sitting idle since last March. It’s my 5 lb. Dayton pattern, hung on a 37" Hickory haft.
Sure, a splitting maul would be more prudent. But a 5 pounds, with a honed Scandi grind, it more than does the job, even on knotty Gamble’s Oak. This gratuitous choice of equipment is about as far as my indulgence goes in my home heating program. The only thing more decadent will be when I stay inside and just turn up the thermostat during the late winter snowstorms next spring. But this is not an essay on weather predictions, home energy consumption, or even axes. This is an essay about User Experience and Interaction design, written by a designer. If you are interested in axes, consider any knowledge gleaned an added feature.
I have axes like some people have golf clubs. Which is to say, I have many. More than necessary. Each designed for its own unique purpose, often only evident to me. An axe is, objectively, a few or more pounds of steel, and a few feet of wood. In material terms, it is very little. Which is fundamental in it’s appeal to me. In recent years the axe has found itself to be a cultural symbol, metaphor, and sign of the times. Most compelling to me, however, is that an axe exists in a dichotomy of associations. First, I am a recovering romantic, prone to occasional bouts of nostalgia. Second, I am also a designer, inherently interested in efficacy, progress, improvement, and technological advancement.
This essay focuses on the latter: the axe as a study in design. There is plenty of prose and poetry dedicated to the former, and much of it does a better job than this average author could at expressing the historical symbolism of the Axe and it’s place in the western man — and women’s — cultural psyche. I will resist the urge to indulge in my personal relationship with this tool, and say only that, as a child, our home was heated by a wood burning stove. The work of…
