What if.... Ponderings over technology

At work we have a copy machine that you have to sign out of when you are done, by clicking buttons on the Touch screen THREE (3) times.  First, click your name in the upper right corner, then select Log Out from the menu, then a new menu comes up asking: Are you sure you want to Log Out? and then you have to hit yes.   Isn't it amazing that something as simple as logging out is made so convoluted?  They can't blame it on safety. 
     When you drive a car and turn left, nobody stops you and wait for you to confirm once or twice that YES, INDEED, I want to turn left.  Imaging the number of accidents that would happen if you had to confirm every little action while driving a car... and response times would increase as would frustration and road rage.  What a waste of time in front of the printer.

At home we have a printer that stops working as soon as one of the colors is finished, even if there is black ink left and you only want to print in black and white.  It just won't print.  It is on strike until you have bought new, expensive color ink (or photo gloss, or whatever it might be), that you don't need for that particular print job. 
    When you drive a car, and the windshield washer fluid runs dry, the car just doesn't stop working and waiting for you to fill up more of it, regardless of where you are.  That would be inconceivable.

Sometimes when you surf the web and look at stuff, the network gets clogged, or the software slows down, and even sometimes, the program or even the computer just crashes, and you are forced to restart the computer.  
   When you drive a car, it suddenly just doesn't stop randomly or goes at tiny speed because of some outside force field or sluggish connection.  That would be pretty dangerous.

Many times you look around on the web and try to find a good restaurant so you browse their web pages, but when you go to their website you are met by 'the intro' - some awful music, slow things (usually photos) moving across the page, and you have to sit there and waste your time unless you can find the tiny semi-hidden text called 'Skip this intro'.  After that torture and time-waste is over, you can start to look for 1) opening hours, 2) address and directions, and 3) the menu.  You would think those three things are the most important information to get to your potential customers, and that at least 1 and 2 should be listed on the opening page of the home page. Oh no, you often have to guess where it is, maybe under 'Contact Us", or 'About Us', or some other non-direct heading.  And often you have to scroll down because the bottom of the page can't be seen at first sight.  For the menus, those are often under a tab, but many are hidden under headings that are tiny, and on extremely slow-loading pages (including the crashing pdf-format), or just small.
    If you drive a car, it doesn't play unwanted intro music when you start it.  It starts up, then it immediately shows you if anything is wrong with the car on the dashboard (any Check Engine light on? Doors open? No, good!).  All information is right there, ready to check out and react to.  Restaurant web pages are like Lego Men hidden in pizza dough, you can't find them or you find a little piece but you can't see the rest.

Who designs these things?  I thought designers' jobs were to make things that WORK WELL and LOOK GOOD.  The first of those things, i.e. practicality, user-friendliness, and usability is as important as that it looks great.  The funny thing is that often the companies insist that their way of doing things are for our convenience, when in reality these things cause us inconvenience, frustration, or just waste time.  Books never fail to open.  Compasses never run out of batteries. Simplicity and ease-of-use means just that, simplicity. 

Will it take 50-100 years to make the internet, printers, copiers, and computers as user-friendly and reliable as cars?  I hope not.  Of course cars break down at times, but they are far more reliable than most of our other home electronics.  I love things that work and that even if complicated, are easy to use. Don't get me started on the design of remote controls... you would think they get paid by the numbers of buttons they put on them.  How long did it take for cars to enter the phase of user-friendliness?  And maybe cars are now on their way to become less user-friendly again?  I haven't mastered the GPS in PP's car at all, because it is not at all intuitive. 

PS.  OK, you want examples of bad design offenders? Here is one...
Prune Restaurant, New York City   
You have to CLICK to enter their website.  What did they think, that you got to their website by accident and need to confirm with them that you actually want to be there?  And then click on Menu and see if you can see their partial tiny menu in a scrolling window... The prices on the lunch menu are about 4 mm tall on my screen.  That is about half as big as a black pepper corn.  Anybody that can read the ingredients on the Bloody Mary menu online ought to get a free drink, or two. Prune, shape up, and fix your website please...

I think Steve Jobs got it right in this quote:

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Elevator quote

"Dear elevator, work has been up and down recently". 

(heard in our kitchen a few days ago)

Arrows in the soil...

(LS: A wonderful poem about times past and connections between now and then)


American Life in Poetry: Column 337 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

South Dakota poet Leo Dangel has written some of the best and truest poems about rural life that I’m aware of. Here’s a fine one about a chance discovery. 


Behind the Plow

I look in the turned sod
for an iron bolt that fell
from the plow frame
and find instead an arrowhead
with delicate, chipped edges,
still sharp, not much larger
than a woman’s long fingernail.
Pleased, I put the arrowhead
into my overalls pocket,
knowing that the man who shot
the arrow and lost his work
must have looked for it
much longer than I will
look for that bolt.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1987 by Leo Dangel, whose most recent book of poems is The Crow on the Golden Arches, Spoon River Poetry Press, 2004. Poem reprinted from A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry, Patrick Hicks, Ed., Pine Hill Press, Inc., 2010, by permission of Leo Dangel and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation.

Stamp of today is an adjustable wrench ('skiftnyckel' =adjustable key), a Swedish invention patented by Johan Petter Johansson. I love these old drawings with their letters and lines for the hollow parts you can't see from the outside.  I like the design with the postage inside the mouth of the wrench too, 2 kronor 70 öre. growing up in Sweden I didn't think these wrenches were such a big deal, but I learned better after hearing from the experts. 


You can see on the picture how these developed from the ones made in Enköping, Sweden, in the 1880s to today's wrenches sold by Bahco (still in Enköping). They are nearly the same! (Click on photo for larger version.  Photo by Theresemk and from Wikipedia. )

True museums mark things up properly...

...like this damage to the back of a Galloping Goose train car marked "rotary 02 Vance Junction 1949" at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, CO. In February 1949, during one of the snowiest winters on record, one of the rotary snowplowers at the Rio Grande Southern Railroad exploded at Vance Junction in Colorado and destroyed some other trains cars like this one (and itself). Rotary snowplows were steam-driven plows run first in a train set, being pushed by steam locomotives behind it, The plow boiler powered a giant lamprey-shaped sucking 'mouth' at the front, working like a giant drill/snowblower through deep snowdrifts in the Rockies and the Plains.  The general model is still used today on diesel trains. Here is a great video of a steam rotary snowplow in use in this area of Colorado.

I think this is from the paper at the time, cited on the Narrow Gauge Railroad Forum:

"February 10, 1949, Thursday
Rio Grande Southern Rotary Explodes
The RGS was dealt a severe blow last week when its only rotary snow plow blew up. A crew had brought the rotary in from Ridgway Thursday, leaving it at Vance Junction while they spent the night in Telluride. About 5:30 Friday morning, they received a call that the rotary had exploded.  The plow was extensively damaged, possibly beyond repair. Holes were blown in the boiler, the grates, and chuck were blown out, and the cab was pretty well wrecked. The rotary was to have gone on toward Rico Friday. Left with only a flanger for snow equipment, it is now very uncertain when the road will be opened. "

This happened at the worst possible time:

"1949 was a particularly harsh winter, and the northern/western railroads were buried. The then-standard steam rotaries proved incapable of dealing  with the snow. The railroads looked at several possible solutions to the problem of insufficient plowing ability."(link)

And rotary snowplows are still used nowadays:


(Diesel driven old rotary snowplow at the Colorado Railroad Museum.  Doesn't the front look like either an intestinal parasite ready to burrow into some flesh, or a lamprey or leech ready to take a bite?


"Heavy snows in January 1997 hit the northern/western US very hard,  crippling BNSF operations. BNSF called out at least 6 plows (5 ex BN, 1  ex ATSF), but two plows had severe mechanical problems, so they could not  plow. [...]  In addition to the BNSF and UP plow, two SP rotaries were  called to clear Donner Pass on 23-24 Janaury 1997. This extent and  duration of rotary use has not been seen since 1949."  (link)

Proof here that rotary plows are still being used:

bumpers, couplers, hooks and trains

Here is an old Swedish box car with a typical European 'bumper' - these come in pairs and prevent the cars to crash into each other. The coupler that hooks the train together is also different from the American ones (see below).


American tender car without a bumper, just a giant coupler to pull the train with.

I hope this is correct, if not, PP can correct the facts. :)

4th of July today

Google is celebrating Rube Goldberg's birthday and US Independence Day at once...

For the love of inventiveness

This is a great read by Maira Kalman: Can do about Benjamin Franklin and inventions.

Inventions are not only in mechanics and science, but also food, design, and art of course. Some of my favorite inventions are the cheese slicer, the garden hose, basket weaving, barbecue sauce, digital photography, printed books, words like Andromeda and ivory bill, pepper grinders, and I often wonder who tasted the first smoked fish. Probably someone a long, long time ago, before we really had language, but they invented things already back then. Some fresh fish left over the dying fire by mistake became smoked fish for breakfast. If you discover something inadvertently, is it still a stroke of genius? :)

Up and Down

Going Up?

Check out the Paternoster, Crazy design!

My mother worked as an Elevator Operator in a Hotel in Cleveland in the 1930's...does anyone even know that such a job existed?