simont | I want to change the world

I want to change the world

Specifically, I want to introduce regression testing in physical design work, and have a worldwide list of test cases across all companies making a given thing.

(Warning: lengthy rant ahead.)

I just went to the office kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee; decaff, of course, as befits my ludicrous caffeine sensitivity. Unlike the industrial-scale coffee machine for real caffeine drinkers, the (instant) decaff coffee is kept in a good old-fashioned very big jar, out of which you spoon it into your mug.

A month or two ago they changed the jar: instead of using the jar in which the coffee is sold, they now have a nice plastic reusable jar. Very nice. Except that there's a design flaw.

The lid of the old jar, if you turned it upside down, was concave. This meant you could hold the lid under your spoonful of coffee granules as you transferred it from the jar to the cup, and any grains that fell off the spoon would be caught in the lid and could be returned to the jar without wastage. But the lid of the new plastic reusable jar is convex on both sides, so if you're clumsy then there's no way to stop coffee granules falling on the table.

This office itself – the actual building – also has a design flaw. On both the ground floor and the first floor, there are windows going from floor to ceiling. When it was built, and we were all given a tour of it before anyone moved in, I noticed a couple of sheets of paper lying on one desk, which turned out to be a guide to the building. In that guide it warned that if you were female, you worked on the first floor, and your desk was situated against one of these floor-to-ceiling windows, then you should be careful about wearing short skirts, since passers-by could look up them through the window below desk level. Very thoughtful of them, I'm sure, but why couldn't they have thought of that before putting those windows in?

I've worn basically the same model of Casio watch since I was 13, and have owned four or five different instances of it. Someone keeps changing the exterior styling and minor design details, presumably to justify keeping their job. In one incarnation, they changed the flat plastic display face to a stylishly curved one. It presumably didn't occur to them, and indeed it didn't occur to me either until it actually bit me, that a flat face is quite hard to scratch except right at the edges where it hits things; but a curved face can scratch anywhere, and indeed within a week of buying that watch it had a huge scratch across the centre of the face which seriously obscured the time display. (Fortunately, they went back to flat faces shortly afterwards, and my current watch is fine.)

I had a similar problem with a digital LED alarm clock, which again had a curved face where the previous one had been flat. With alarm clocks, the problem is that you don't want the big bright reflection of the bedroom window to obscure the time display. If a flat clock face happens to precisely reflect the window light on to the location of your eyes when you're in bed, this is easily solved by turning the clock a little bit. But a curved face will reflect the window no matter what angle it's at, so you can't get away from having a reflection obscuring the time.

Coming back to this office building … one of the back doors used to be not only flawed, but downright dangerously flawed. The double doors overlapped a bit in the middle, so you had to push the right-hand door open before the left. On each door was a big vertical metal bar intended for you to grip to open or close the door. So you grip the right-hand bar, push, and discover that the bar is much too close to the overlap between the doors, and your knuckles get caught painfully between the bar and the left-hand door. If you're in a real hurry, this could probably result in a broken finger. Luckily, I was pretty relaxed the first time I encountered this door, and escaped with only minor abrasions. On the other hand, when I next used that door two months later I'd forgotten about it, and got minor abrasions again.

Some public-spirited soul responded to this quickly by printing a sign for the door saying ‘BEWARE OF THIS DOOR’. Didn't help much, because it didn't tell you what to beware of. I checked the door for live mains wiring, buckets of whitewash balanced on top of it, dodgy hinges, etc … and eventually found nothing worrying, gripped the handle, pushed, *ow*.

(The door has now been fixed: since you don't need anything more than a flat surface to open a door marked ‘push’, the bars have simply been removed.)

There's something deeply disturbing in the above list. In all these cases, there's a design flaw – sometimes quite serious – in an everyday item that as a species we have been building for decades (digital alarm clocks) if not millennia (buildings). How can we still be making this kind of fundamental mistake, on what appears to be a regular basis?

I'm not blaming any of these designers, per se, for failing to anticipate a particular design flaw. Each of the flaws I've described above is something I think one could reasonably be forgiven for not having foreseen, the first time. It's only because I can't believe it was the first time in every case that I get angry about it.

My guess is that there are two factors in operation. One is that there's no central Design Authority which works out the best possible shape for a coffee jar or an alarm clock; instead, each individual company does its own design independently. This is great from some points of view – it means innovative new designs can prove their worth without having to convince a committee of closed-minded theoreticians – but one area in which it falls down is fault-fixing, because companies don't appear to routinely go around learning from one another's mistakes.

The other factor is that companies don't internally seem to be good at keeping track of the reasons for their design decisions. Casio had been making watches with flat display faces for years and years and years. I suppose it's possible that they had previously never even considered anything else, that at some point they discovered how to make curved faces cheaply, tried it, found the watches all scratched, and returned to Plan A, and that I happened to be a victim of that ill-fated venture; but it just doesn't seem likely to me. Far more likely, I think, that someone actually put in some thought at one stage and decided that flat faces were a good idea, and later on some overzealous designer thought it would be fun to move to curved faces, and somehow the good common sense of the first guy didn't communicate itself to the second.

So it would be a good start to have companies who design things just do regression testing, even if only as a thought experiment. Every time someone fixes a design flaw, they should add the flaw and the fix to a list somewhere. ‘1988-04-05: Curved display faces can scratch in the middle. Reverted to using flat ones universally.’ Then arrange that it's a serious gaffe for any designer to make a gratuitous change in a product without first checking that list and making sure they haven't reintroduced a problem that someone had carefully fixed fifteen years ago.

Better than that, though, would be to have some kind of a cross-company repository of good common sense: things to take into account when designing buildings, doors, clocks, coffee jars, whatever. I realise that this is the seriously unrealistic bit, since it requires competing companies to cooperate, but at the very least there should be some mechanism whereby a brand new building firm, starting up in business for the first time and landing a large contract for a great big office block, can somehow benefit from the experience of all the office building that has happened in the previous fifty years.

I wonder if there's any way that could be arranged to happen.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sounds like a great plan!

The watch thing: curved faces are more liable to scratches but less liable to fracture - the force of the impact is deflected sideways and so doesn't smash the watch face. See the design of mediaeval armour, which deflects spear points away from vital organs.

It looks to me like they thought they had a material scratch-resistant enough to make it worthwhile moving to curved faces, and then found they didn't.

I suspect the jar thing is also explicable in that the convex undersurface makes a better airtight seal stopping the coffee going off. As far as spillage goes, instead of holding the lid under the spoon while transferring to the cup, why not hold the cup under the spoon?

The nice thing about a rant like this is that the fact that there's a design flaw I still hadn't thought of only reinforces my central point :-) I didn't know about the fracturing issue; thanks.

Holding the cup under the spoon (hence presumably over the jar) is something else I hadn't thought of, but thirty seconds' thought suggests that it's only sensible if the cup is entirely dry. If it's my second cup of coffee, and especially if I've rinsed the mug out just beforehand, the cup will probably drip into the coffee jar and begin to spoil the coffee in there, probably causing more wastage than just letting a few granules fall on the table.

Huh? With one hand move the mug directly alongside coffee jar; with the other hand use spoon to transfer coffee to mug. Spillage will be minimal, and I can see no way that liquid from the mug could transfer to the coffee jar. (If this method is insufficiently flawless, then I'd be interested to know how you spoon things from pans or serving dishes onto plates / into bowls, etc.?)

Bad design irritates me, and bad design for no apparent reason irritates me more, but what irritates me most is that people seem willing to accept bad design and brokenness in everything around them -- from "Oh, it always spills when you open it" to "Oh, they do crash occasionally". Now I realise that it's realistic and sensible to have some expectation of imperfections in the world around us, but personally I don't like accepting mediocrity or outright crapness as the best of all available alternatives. (In the end, though, it's a personal decision as to whether the potential improvement is worth the effort of finding a better alternative.)

I hold the pan over the plate, which works much better. (I do that with coffee jars too, when they're not much too large to lift, like this one.)

The willingness to accept bad design is presumably a third factor in why manufacturers don't generally find it worth their while to fix things or to pre-emptively avoid flaws in the first place; if their customers can't be bothered to vote with their wallets and will continue forking out money for a broken product, why bother?

Surely being much too large to lift is a flaw in a coffeejar? Doesn't it hold so much coffee that some goes stale? (I hold the jar tilted over the mug for this operation.)

1) Towel
2) It's coffee granules and I doubt the world would end if you spilt a couple
3) Or you could use a bigger spoon so less of the teaspoonful sitting in the middle is spilt over the edge. My friend's father did this after he had a stroke, and as his coordination came back the tea got sweeter and sweeter until nobody could bear to drink it.
4) This shows without a doubt that tea is better than coffee.

Now here's a question - why do they want to prevent wastage?

As a responsible citizen, you want to "reduce, re-use & recycle". But as a coffe company, they want to sell coffee. The faster you use it - wether your usage is in a cup or by sprinkling liberally over the floor - the more money they make when you buy more coffee.

The watch is another good example. As far as Casio are concerned, they're not really averse to you scratching the face of the watch. Or shattering it, if it's a flat face. They'd prefer, of course, that it not happen for a year or so - so that you blame yourself, not your new watch, and think to buy a replacement rather than an alternative. But they almost certainly view the watch as something replaceable, rather than something so reliable and serviceable that you'll pass it on to great-grandchildren. Old mechanical pocket watches that came in clamshell arrangements and were so durable because they were so expensive - people would be annoyed if they had to spend a month's wages on a new watch every other year...

(Ironically, it seems that these days "good design" still commands a price premium - but more for the design than any inherent durability. You could spend a month's wages on a watch today, and the only concession to durability would be a titanium alloy. The face would probably scratch as easily as any cheap watch, and I'm not convinced that any better accuracy in timekeeping would be worth the amount you're paying - a cheap watch rarely loses a second per month at most these days... Anyway. I'm rambling.. Back to the point!)

The rest of your rants are good examples of crap design, though. The alarm clock one I can especially sympathise with - it smacks of a lack of using the product before selling it...

As with regards to the list for designers, I think that's a great idea. However, I feel it would be unwieldy - and prone to political compromise within the organisation.

An alternative presents itself, though - set up a wiki (or something similar) and put your own notes into it. The wiki can help categorise and organise them. That way, next time you want to buy a timepiece you can approach the market as an informed customer, armed with a litany of pros and cons to evaluate any design.
By making it public, maybe a significant enough chunk of the public will become informed, thus driving bad design out across all companies.

Let me know when you've set the wiki up. I have a few things to put in there myself... :-)

Price competition: a cup of coffee plus some wastage is more expensive than a cup of coffee plus no wastage, given a fixed price per grain.

Only if people think about this when buying the coffee, which the vast majority probably don't.

More people would notice if the wastage was higher.

I work on the first floor of an office with floor to ceiling windows. Luckily I never wear skirts let alone a short one and to work.

Worryingly, I now have to satisfy curiosity by wandering around seeing if I can actually see up anybody's skirt.

The problem is that there are lots of over-zealous designers who would be very good scientists or painters or actors or furniture-makers, but they were taught at school that people can't do things they weren't told to do, and nobody told them to see if they could do something with their enthusiasm instead of sitting cross-legged on the floor pretending to be stupid so they enthusiastically design things over and over again as a substitute for enthusiastically doing something useful.

Convex on both sides?! How does it manage to be a lid?

A lid that plugs into the jar, rather than being screwed down by a thread around teh outside of the jarneck, could very easily be for all practical purposes wholly convex.

Like this:

Might it be easier to set up a repository of common sense which you examine when buying things (whether coffee jars, watches, office space, or whatever)? Then the magic of capitalism would drive all the stupid products out of the market (hopefully by companies twigging on to the repository).

Might such repositories even already exist somewhere on the web? (I’ve not checked, sounds like the sort of thing Which might be into, though they probably want you to pay.)

Great minds think alike - my final suggestion was a wiki for this! :-)

Capitalism doesn't work.

Neither does a mildly sarcastic tone of voice.

Not online I fear.

I want to change the world

Excellent. Do let me know if you manage it; I got exhausted and gave up..

(The door has now been fixed: since you don't need anything more than a flat surface to open a door marked ‘push’, the bars have simply been removed.)

This is one of the little things that irks me. Brains process physical-visual-spatial information much faster than written information; therefore, if I see a door with a handle / raised bar on it, I think "must be a pull door", and pull it. It's normally only while failing to do this that I finish reading the sign that says "push".. Grr..

I'm not blaming any of these designers, per se, for failing to anticipate a particular design flaw. Each of the flaws I've described above is something I think one could reasonably be forgiven for not having foreseen, the first time. It's only because I can't believe it was the first time in every case that I get angry about it. [..]

Yes. Yes yes yes. You seem to have raised a lot of the thoughts that have been bugging me, consciously or not, for years. I started noticing them in the IT world, but when you "get your eye in", you can spot them everywhere.

Have you ever read Christopher Alexander (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander)'s The Timeless Way of Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building) (@amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195024028/))? It's the book that's supposed to have inspired the GoF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_four) to write Design Patterns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns). It seems to touch on a lot of these issues on the architectural domain; the other thing I've noticed is that reads an awful lot like the Tao Te Ching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_te_ching)..

Isn't there a chance that many companies are forced to compromise on design because all the really *good* thing-designs have already been patented by someone else?

You can't patent a design.</pedant> (You can *register* a design in the UK, but I don't believe that has international applicability. You can probably indirectly patent designs, if you've got a sufficient wad of cash to blow on patent attorneys.)

Surely a design is capable of also being an 'invention' - eg, device for dispensing instant coffee with minimal spillage, or similar?

Yes, a "method of minimising wastage during dispensing of a granulated substance" or somesuch probably would cover the design of any crucial subcomponents used in the process. It just has to be expressed in the right way; you're not patenting the design per se, you're patenting the invention. (It's probably more subtle and can be better expressed than I've put it.)

You’d hope in that case that all the really good designs had been patented over twenty years ago, and were now in the public domain. I mean, how difficult was it to design a coffee jar in the 60s?

Have you read "The Design of Everyday Things" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262640376/qid=1105361815/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-4427501-1463811), or any other of Donald Norman's works? Sounds like you might enjoy them. I'd be happy to lend you that one if you want, actually, if I can find it.

*applause* Good rant. Maybe the designer of the coffee jar thought he didn't have to wory about shaky hands as it is for decaf ;P

*laughs*

Sadly, my hands are incompetent in an entirely non-shaky way; I spill coffee all over the table in a single smooth graceful motion.

"I noticed a couple of sheets of paper lying on one desk, which turned out to be a guide to the building."

Dude! Your building came with RELEASE NOTES?

And it needed them, too!

When does it come out of beta?

A central design agency would be good.
Maybe just a webpage, moderated, where tips and hints and such should be documented.
But this would be bad because companies and universities would be giving away intellectual capital rather than raking in $$ from it.

Nevermind the issue of the IC dissolving on it's own, and general public suffering from lack of ability to prescreen the design intelligence of everyone with whom they will be dealing.

BTW, first floor, in the UK, is that one up from the ground floor? I know this is an odd question, but in the US, first floor == ground floor (and light switches are up for on).

Anyway, with the proper content management, it would be fairly easy to set up a "Design Flaw Avoidance" website.

Floor numbering in the UK usually goes:

3
2
1
G(round)
B(asement)1
B2
...

with possible complications added by Mezzanine floors between those.

Which way is "up" for a light switch? :)

Better than that, though, would be to have some kind of a cross-company repository of good common sense

Those repositories exist, and many companies have plenty of them. They're the engineers who have been around a while, who take the time to look at competing products and "borrow" the good ideas. They can usually be identified by their grey or missing hair =)

Unfortunately, a database can very rarely be a replacement for experience.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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