"You know what happens," the guy said to management, "to a lot of people (he did not want to say women because he would have been accused of being a misogynist by the one woman on the management team) they leave the car and forget to lock the doors, or think that they will be back in five minutes so they are too lazy to lock them, and ¡bam! a car thief makes off with the car in a New York Minute. So, here is the perfect answer to that problem: a wireless device to lock the doors of a car with just the push of a button."
The guy was given a substantial raise and he was promoted to head of design at the car company.
OK, now flash forward twenty years. How do you defeat such great design? Easily. A few days ago, a person I know (no names, please) got out of the car, dutifully clicked on the device to lock the doors and walked away from the car. Why do I say that this wonderful design was defeated? BECAUSE THE PERSON LEFT A WINDOW OPEN! And, not only that, when the car alarm complained by bipping, this person, ignored the beeps and was even annoyed by them!
I wish they would make talking alarms that would shout insults,
"Hey, dummy, you forgot to close the door!
TV clickers, those long black things with lots of buttons that allow you to change channels, adjust the volume, and so on were designed so that one didn't have to get up from the couch to go twist a dial or push a button on the TV set itself when you wanted to change channels or adjust the volumen. How can a person defeat this design? Easily: you leave the clicker in another room!
Some smart designer made a brush with a handle that fits neatly onto the handle of the matching dust pan. Thus you keep both items together neatly without having to look for one or the other when you want to, say, pick up the cat litter that your cat pushes out of the litter box.
Why is it, then, that every time I want to use said items I can find the brush but not the dust pan or the dust pan but not the brush? Foiled again, Mr. Designer.
Pens are a favorite subject around our house. It seems you can never find one when one wants to write down a message or take down a telephone number. My wife buys boxes of them and they all quietly, mysteriously disappear. So, she decided to get a pen designed to avoid those pesky pens that run away. She got one of those pens that are attached to a base by a chain!
Oh, yeah? Well try to find both pen and base. They seem to have run away like those prisoners that escape chained together in those prison movies.
When I worked in the systems support department of a large corporation, we systems engineers dreaded the time we had to answer calls for support from users. No matter how "fool proof" we or the designers of computer software made things, users would find a way to defeat the design. Idiots and fools can prove incredibly ingenious when it comes to making stupid mistakes or defeating the purpose of a design.
Take floppy disks, for example. Most people nowadays do not remember why floppy disks were called that. It was because they were indeed floppy, made of very thin material. So, they came protected by a harder plastic cover. Well, there was always some enterprising moron who would look at the thing, figure that if the floppy was going to be read by the machine it should be taken out of its cover! One guy cut the cover with a large pair of scissors, put the floppy part into the floppy disk reader, and after the reader crunched it up into a ball of plastic, he brought it to us at the systems department to complain that his machine did not work properly.
There is a web site http://www.darwinawards.com that records the fatal disregard of the obvious, the warning sings, the defeat of designs that are meant to keep you safe. The results are tragic...although they do make me laugh. I especially like the story of the man who turned off the lights of his car to "save electricity." A 40 ton truck showed him it was a bad idea.
There has been a lot of reports lately that car makers are working on production of "driverless" cars. That is, cars that drive themselves. Well, if that doesn't scare you into becoming a Jehovah Witness I don't know what does. Can you imagine some guy defeating that little piece of design? "Oh, let's see what happens if ..."
Nothing, absolutely nothing is "idiot proof". Only an idiot would believe things can be idiot proof.
No comments:
Post a Comment