Last weekend I was wrestling with a ketchup bottle. The lid had that dried crust around the nozzle - you know what I’m talking about - where you have to pick at it before anything comes out, and even then it's more of a splat than a pour. It reminded me of a story I'd read years ago about how the bottle came to be.

In the late 1980s, Heinz commissioned researchers to go into family homes and watch people use ketchup at dinner. Not surprisingly, the heaviest ketchup consumers in any household were the kids. A typical five-year-old consumes about 60% more ketchup than a typical 40-year-old. 

And yet, ketchup consumption was controlled by the parent. The bottle was glass, heavy, requiring a firm grip and a good thump to get anything moving. Casey Keller, a former Heinz manager who was part of the research, recalled watching a three-year-old reach for the bottle and get intercepted by his mother, who doled out a small amount and set it back down. The child's face fell.

It wasn’t like Heinz had designed the bottle to prevent children from using it. The glass bottle had been designed for the adult who bought it, and that stayed - for over a century - without anyone sitting down to question it. Heinz redesigned it into a soft plastic squeeze bottle light enough for a child to hold and control. 

In homes where the new bottle was introduced, ketchup consumption rose by up to 12%. 

The upside-down bottle came later, after a second round of research turned up the same thing: people had already solved the problem themselves, storing their plastic bottles upside down in the fridge to get the ketchup to flow.

The ketchup bottle is easy to see once you hear the story. Most of the other stories aren’t as noticeable - the structure of a workday, what a reasonable portion size looks like, what a successful career looks like at 40, the order you encounter things walking into a grocery store - these were not flukes. 

Someone made those calls for a specific person at a specific moment, and most of it has just been running on its own momentum since.

You can live inside that for a long time without it registering as a choice at all. It registers as a regular day. Noticing doesn't obligate you to do anything differently. You might keep the same habits, the same structure, reach for the same bottle. 

Doing it on purpose and doing it because that’s how it’s done, are not the same thing, even when the outcome looks identical.

I'm not interested in the version of this that curdles into suspicion, pessimism or conspiracy theory - where every designed object becomes evidence of bad intent. Most of the people who built the structures around us were just trying to solve a problem for someone. You get to be the one who asks whether that someone was you.