They Call It Defensive Design; I Call It "We're Too Weak to Survive on Our Own"
Sixteen years ago, I set foot for the first time in the United States of America. I chose San Francisco, California, as my entry point into U.S. civilization—the heart of tech innovation and the birthplace of the most famous startups. Also, the world’s worst hotbed for personal injury litigations, as I was about to find out.
Fresh out of the plane and into the super-comfy bathroom of the Kimpton Hotel in San Francisco City Center, I stumbled upon a shower cap that had an ominous message written on it: “Warning – only fits one head.” At first, I thought it was a joke, picturing the absurd circumstances that would make a manufacturer feel the need to clarify something so obvious. What was the stuff of jokes for us Eastern Europeans — born and raised outside the bubble of hyper-cautious legal culture — was a matter of liability prevention for Americans.
Hi, I’m Bogdan and I’m 42 years old. I’m not a boomer. I’m not a MIllenial. I’m a kid born in the “generația cu cheia la gât”. And I survived to tell the tale.
We were the generation that was raised exclusively on the streets of a country that was re-inventing itself. Our parents and grandparents rarely knew where we were, and that was perfectly fine. In Eastern Europe, childhood meant playing in the world’s most dangerous “playgrounds” - factories, abandoned buildings, and construction sites with very few, if any, safety measures. If you made it through, it was because you were strong, fast, or lucky enough not to fall off a shaky piece of scaffolding or get impaled by a bunch of old, rusty rebar jutting out of concrete pylons.
Born in the early ‘80s in a provincial Romanian town, I was part of a world where risk wasn’t something to be mitigated - it was part of life. We climbed unfinished concrete skeletons of apartment blocks, balancing on rebar at 30 meters above the grey grounds, with no safety nets, health insurance or contingencies. We were playing on train tracks, jumping off bridges into rivers with no idea what lay beneath. We’d steal grapes and strawberries from here and there and we barely had time to climb up trees seconds before guard dogs that we failed to spot would have torn our butt cheeks apart. We were living in a cartoon world where we took turns holding homemade explosives, lighting them and throwing them at the last possible second. Our playdays consisted of literally hundreds of ways we could get killed or severely mutilated — and no adult was even marginally aware of that.
There was no one to bubble-wrap us, no warning labels, no lawsuits. If you were stupid enough to get hurt, well, that was on you. A testament to that are the scars I still carry: the failed firework that nearly tore my fingers apart, the nasty L-shaped scar on my right cheek from dunk-diving through a storefront window, and the stitches I got without anesthesia in one of the hospitals with the lowest survival rates in the European Union.
Fast forward to today, where the modern world is child-proofed to protect us from ourselves, whether you like it or not. They call it “defensive design.” I call it “we’re too weak to survive on our own.”
The Samsung Galaxy Pro earbuds that kill the beat as sirens pass by; the wheelbarrow that bears a small waring label telling the world that it “is not intended for highway use”; a carpenter’s electric drill with the cautionary “This product not intended for use as a dental drill” message, as if both carpenters and dentists would suddenly lose their minds and start playing with each other’s tools.
Everything is padded, labeled, child-locked, and idiot-proofed. A world where coffee cups warn that their contents might be hot, where VR headsets gently remind you to take breaks, and where cars beep if you don’t fasten your seatbelt - because the assumption is that people need to be saved from their own inability to tell how things will end.
This overemphasis on defensive design looks cool at first. Thousands of engineers making sure that you can’t stick a fork in a power socket - not even if you try to do it like there’s no tomorrow. Thousands of people who build active barriers to prevent you from running your car with the driver’s door open. Thousands of engineers who spend precious time designing technology that actively prevent you from getting electrocuted when you stick your hands into an electrical panel and wiggle them around as if you were looking for it. Thousands of people who waste time to protect you from yourself, instead of innovating things that could actually help progress, not just coddle.
But it also raises questions about our society’s perception of individual capability. Are we so litigious and risk-averse that we must be shielded from even the most self-evident dangers? While protecting consumers is essential, there’s a fine line between safeguarding and patronizing. Perhaps it’s time to reassess whether some of these measures are truly necessary or if they’re merely a reflection of an overprotective culture.
Defensive design, they call it. I call it an admission of defeat. A civilization so desperate to prevent harm that it forgets that survival, learning, and common sense come from experience. There was a time when we figured things out because our lives depended on it. Now, everything is designed to ensure we never have to.
