Sinister people will one day rule

This one is less about design inspiration and more a rant. Recently i have heard a lot of poor design ideas being justified with the phrase:- "It is designed for right handed use because there are more right handed people in the world".

Now i am goofy, southpaw, cack handed or whatever mildy offensive term you want to use to describe a lefty. However this is not why i get annoyed. I get annoyed by the ridiculous idea that even though a person has 2 hands, they only use 1. Granted there are a few things you only do with your dominant hand. These are tasks that require great precision, for example writing. However for non precision tasks i argue that we are all lefties (and all righties).

Consider the following example

You are a righty. You are travelling on a very busy commuter bus and didn't get a seat. You are holding the only hand rail you can gain access to and you can only reach it with your right hand. Your mobile phone rings. The design team at Nokia have designed the device for right handed people (because their are more of them in the world). What do you do? 2 options: Let go of the handrail (and potentially lose your balance and fall) or answer the call with your left hand (with difficulty because it was designed for right handed use).

Now there are hundreds of situations like this in life and they are not uncommon occurances. If you are a designer reading this I urge you to think about how you use your own products. Do you always use them with your dominate hand? or do you actually switch them between hands depending on context. I argue that you use your non dominant hand more than you realize and that modern men and women in many cases are actually lefties and righties. By not realizing this and designing just for the righties you are not just failing the lefties of the world you are actually also failing the righties.

Just to point out some irony in this...creative industries have an unusually high percentage of lefties compared to other industries.

Oh, and the word sinister comes from the latin word sinistra, which means left. Hence the title.