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Left in the lurch
Published 30 August 1999
Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams uncovers a sinister plot
Until the latest crew change in Star Trek set matters right, even the androids in science fiction were universally right-handed. It is one of the oldest and most insidious bases for discrimination. The Bible repeatedly declares a bias in favour of God's and everybody else's right hand and against the left. A string of terms exist to label or insult left-handers, and in many languages, including our own, the very terms "left" and "right" are loaded with multiple meaning, as you can see from my opening sentence. I even have a book on symmetry that is indexed "laevo-, see under: dextro-".
Around one in ten people is left-handed. Much of the effort to recognise the needs of this large minority focuses on teaching children to write from left to right without difficulty. (In order not to cover what they are writing, left-handers have a tendency to mirror-write or to grip their pens uncomfortably, which can become a serious handicap by the time they are taking exams.)
But almost every unimanual activity, from zipping one's trousers to using a cash machine, is biased in favour of right-handers. A visit to Anything Left-Handed, the Soho shop of the Left-Handers' Club, hints at the extent of the iniquity. There are scissors, tin-openers, fountain pens and much else in the tiny shop and its reverse-paginated catalogue. But there are also products where most people would not at first suspect any bias - rulers and tape measures (numbered from right to left), corkscrews (turning anti-clockwise for a better purchase), kitchen knives (serrated on the other side of the blade). A clock that runs backwards, with the numbers counting up anti-clockwise, seems to be taking things a little far. There is also a CD of music played by left-handers, although I'm not sure how you tell; sadly, though, it does not appear to stock Ravel's dazzling piano concerto for the left hand, written for Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the philosopher Ludwig, who lost his right arm in the first world war.
The discrimination designed into so many products may be more than an inconvenience. A psychologist, Stanley Coren, surveyed students at his university in Canada and found that a left-hander was almost twice as likely as a right-hander to have a car accident and half again as likely to have an accident while using a tool of some kind. Coren attributed the cause not to any innate clumsiness of southpaws but to design that is consciously or unconsciously biased to suit right-handers.
Coren has elevated this unwitting injustice into a conspiracy. He believes these accidents are in effect culling left-handers, since while 13 per cent of students were left-handed, it had been found that only 1 per cent of 80-year-olds was. The more obvious explanation for the discrepancy lies in the fact that children today do not have left-handedness beaten out of them as ruthlessly as in the past. Others believe that left-handers' alleged greater propensity to smoke and drink may be to blame for the fall-off. Maybe the answer is to devise handed glasses and cigarettes that make these habits endurable only to right-handers.
There are a few products where left-handers may accidentally be the gainers. Singer sewing machines, whether in error or by design, gave the skilled job of steering the cloth past the needle to the left hand while the right cranks the wheel. But serious attempts to design for left-handers are few and far between. There are a few honourable exceptions where manufacturers have eliminated bias or in a very few cases brought out left-handers' versions of products. All the high street banks now provide left-handed chequebooks that make it easier to fill in the stubs.
Anything Left-Handed has a few tools for the manual professions, things such as plasterers' trowels, but these serve above all as an unintentional reminder that, as the nature of work changes, people's handedness may matter less. Nevertheless, computer keyboards (with the numeric panel on the right) and mice give problems. Logitech is one computer manufacturer to have introduced a left-handed mouse, designed by the Californian firm Frogdesign. Frogdesign's boss, Hartmut Esslinger, incidentally, has learnt to be right-handed but, as a pianist, nevertheless longs for an instrument with the bass end of the keyboard toward the right.
Kettles were fine until plastic models came along, with fancy features such as the water-level gauge. With the handle oriented to the left for pouring by a left-hander, the gauge was always invisible round the back of the kettle. Black & Decker produced a range of power tools with an override button mounted where it was easy to reach only in right-handed use. In both cases, the manufacturers have been quick to respond when the problem was pointed out to them. The next target for the Left-Handers' Club campaign is cameras and video cameras whose buttons presume right-handed use.
Anything Left-Handed is at 57 Brewer Street, London W1R 3FB (0171-437 3910)
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