The following is an excerpt from "Unpleasant Design,"a book by Gordan Savičić and Selena Savić that looks at the impact of designs intended to deliberately make people uncomfortable. You can buy the book on Amazon.
Living in The Netherlands for several years, we began collecting examples of unpleasant designs in public space.
We noticed this became a global trend and found many examples in other European cities. At first we started photographing, collecting and organizing different examples. Early on we also found similar initiatives that shared their collections on blogs and webpages (Dan Lockton’s "Design With Intent," Survival Group’s "Antisites," etc.) with great examples of unpleasant designs. Some have categorized them really well.
What began to interest us then, was an overall strategic view of the development of unpleasant design; is there or can there be something like a school of thought for "unpleasantness?" How is public space affected by these designs?
We continued to expand our own collection of unpleasant designs, because it contains some unique examples and observations. Here, we're presenting photographs taken in Rotterdam, The Hague, Lausanne and Vienna — cities we frequented often while doing this research.
You can see more on our site here.