![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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?
no subject