One of the more interesting dilemmas designers face on a daily is when do you sacrifice form in favour of function or vice versa. Designing can be a tedious process and if you are a visually stimulated person, sometimes the form and aesthetic takes precedence over function. However, functional design enables society to operate in our world of millions and millions of objects each with specialized purposes. Take for instance, a phone. North americans have a fairly standard knowledge of how a phone works. Based on years of developing the most efficient and functional phone, people for the most part can operate most phones without any written instruction or guidelines.
The standard for number display on a phone, which has developed and simplified over time. (Iphone Keypad
But one thing designers often forget to factor in is the affordance (the intent of the object, ie. a door is opened) of certain materials and objects. To many times designers base assumptions on known affordances with little research on the complete spectrum of affordances their product caters too or does not cater too.
For instance, notebooks and journals have predominately right-aligned coils and bindings. This is because of the assumed affordance of the population is right handed therefore there is a presumed affordance that people’s writing or sketching will not be hindered by the coil or spine. However studies have shown left-handed people to more creative and are as a result are forced to ‘right-handed’ coiled sketch books just as much as right handed people. But because left-handed people have grown to adapt to limiting right-handed design in all aspects of life, the general population accepts this bad design as the norm based on years of familiarity with a poorly designed product.
As awesome as a lefty book sounds, the sad fact is left-handed people have adapted over time to right-handed materials and therefore a book that is 'left-handed' coiled may just be too out of the ordinary
Education is the key, the general population too often believes what they are told. Whether its that brand new soap product with micro-scrubbing fibres (also known as sand) or right-handed notebooks. People make decisions based on what they can see and what their options are. A new soap with ‘micro-srubbing fibres’ is educating the consumer to believe that they have a better product and as such you can perceive the benefits from it. However, if you wanted to achieve the same smooth skin feel of the micro-fibres you can easily go find a hand full of sand and scrub your body raw. The advertising is educating, but also manipulating people. These same manipulated and poorly educated people are buying the product and reinforcing its production. The same can be true for bad design. People learn to love ‘bad design’ which only reinforces more widespread production of items that do not improve or innovate but only frustrate.
wanderingwhale 
As a left-handed person I completely appreciate you referencing right-handed design! I agree that the solution lies behind education. The more knowledge a designer has the better the product they design is going to be. And as you say, we have all become to accustomed to living with bad design. As the ultimate consumer, I know exactly what affects advertising can have on a person’s decision making process. Here’s hoping we all start designing… better.
You make a good point about education and teaching of creating something that could possibly be useful for the public. not everyone is right handed and has to deal with getting use to using there opposite hands to complete every day jobs, possible because of how our society has evolved and the idea of using the left hand was not considered good, possibly the idea is still strong in our society today.
Excellent point on how often we learn to deal with bad designs, thereby reinforcing their continued production. Just because something is designed a certain way, doesn’t mean it needs to remain that way. As designers we need to constantly be aware of this rather than designing to the assumed standard. User testing can play a big part in detecting some of these affordances.