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.

A trip to nostalgia land

The Swedish Museum of Art (Nationalmuseum) in Stockholm is now closed for a several year long renovation, but we visited it one of the last weekends when it was open and I was in Stockholm.  One of the most fun exhibits was the one on functional and industrial design.  It was filled with so many items I know so well from my upbringing in Sweden, and some of them have even made it over to the US.  Here is a selection, with annotations:


When I grew up we had a Lamino chair at home, covered with gray woolskin, and it was wonderful.  I had no idea then that it was a classic bent-wood design.  The chair and its footstool is still in my mom's apartment and I sat in it just a month ago.


Swedish dishbrushes!  Once I went to a summer camp with a girl whose father had the patent on the straight line on the front that you use to scrape off hard pieces from your plates if you turn the brush around.  I bet he got a lot of money from all the dishbrushes that have been made in the last many decades.


This kind of very plastic and cheap-looking lamp was common in youth hostels and rented cabins.  I think we had one too, orange maybe, and I have a vague memory that it nearly caught on fire once, but I could be wrong.  They weren't very good lamps, but popular.


The very practical Swedish queue-system.  Used at every postoffice, bank, police station, you name it. I actually like this a lot better than standing in lines.


A classic telephone, of the type that was provided by the phone company.  Back then you couldn't buy your phone, it was provided and owned by the phone company.  I think this one was made by Ericsson for the state-owned telephone company (which is no more, it is now privatized).  These were still in use in the 2000s, but I think they are gone now, since the outlets are different now.  Oh all the times I sat and dialed the numbers on the turning dial.... You couldn't hurry it, it took its time.


This line of china is one of my favorites, and we had some at home when I grew up.  Blå eld means Blue Fire, and my sister collects this brand.


This is probably the most common object in the whole exhibit.  IKEA's table LACK, which is still being sold.  We have several here at home in the US.  IKEA furnished so many homes in Sweden, it saved our budgets and book collections (thanks for Billy!).  I didn't realize that the LACK design was over 40 years old by now.


I don't know the year of this collection of dairy containers, maybe late 1980s?  Featured here are: regular milk (3% fat), 'middle milk' (1.5% fat), light milk (0.5% fat - too watery for me), mini milk (0% fat or nearly so),  'vispgrädde' heavy cream (40% fat), and 'gräddfil' (sour creme, but runnier, 12% fat).  The containers are Tetrapak, paper with plastic on the inside.  Oh, the memories....  :)

Bacon bits and pieces on the internet

Do you need a new wallet?  Check this one out.

If you just want the flavor, pop a tablet. 

Just want the smell, hang this, or the taste, lick this.

And, if you need to cut some bacon, this would be perfect, right? I want one of these.

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.

Quote from the news: Tools for kids

From today's New York Times, about girls at Gadget Camp:

“Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation,” Ms. Sharris said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.” (source)

 I agree.  Is is nothing bad with books, not at all, but when books replace the real things like carving a stick with a knife, make and tend a fire, drill a hole, cut a plank, fill up a gas tank, and dig a hole, then kids get lost.  We need books and tools.  And skills.  Reading a book is just one skill.  If you can do all the things listed above, then you have six more life skills and you will also be more confident and independent.

Stamp of the day: Hand drill (borrsväng)

 

Do you think there is any other stamp in the world with a hand drill on it? Probably not.  And this one is from Sweden, a land that really values its industrial history.  We had one of these in our workshop when I grew up, and I remember drilling out bird house holes with it.  I think it came from my grandfather (morfar), who had been a wood shop teacher at the local high school.  Look at the cross section through the wood in the background too!  I think Swedish stamps are exceptionally well designed.

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. )