This is my South Park self portrait, from here. Today I went to the library and found a book called The Design of Everyday Things. It makes you think about how things are designed, and how they could be improved. Its discussion of clock radios, where it says that they’re obviously not tested by sleepy people groping around in the dark, brought to mind my continuing search for a clock radio without a major design flaw. My current one is good in every way, except you only have to push one button to change the time, which can happen all to easily by mistake. Another clock radio I used briefly had a flashing separator between the hours and minutes, like this: 06:13 (if you’re using Netscape the colon should be blinking because I used this code 06<blink>:</blink>13, which is taboo. Wow— I’m the Larry Clark of bloggers. ☺ ). When the radio was on, the flashing LEDs made the a very loud bzzzz—t bzzzz—t sound. Did nobody in the factory actually try the radio? I also saw a picture of the taps you see in aeroplane toilets. He said it’s very obvious that you push them (as opposed to turn them), but I say it’s very difficult to rub your hands together with soap if one of your fingers needs to be holding the tap down.

It also explained why you can’t take the back stairs to the basement in the Melbourne University library any more, it’s because people escaping a fire will keep running down and down, and trap themselves in the basement. It’s not easy designing things, it would appear. There’s even a whole section on doors, and how a door handle can show whether the door should be pushed, pulled or slid sideways. The cool thing about the book is that we’ve all stood in front of doors feeling like idiots because it’s not obvious how to open it. Or needed the owner’s advice on how to open a CD cabinet. And some of us (like myself) have stuck a knife or fork into a toaster. To a pre-1990s toaster designer the notion that anyone would be so foolish was so unlikely that they didn’t design for it. But people develop tunnel vision when solving problems— the toaster is stuck, the toast is burning, so I’ll have to get it out; ah— here’s a knife. When I tried this trick in 1982 I only got an electric shock up my entire arm. It was an effective way of learning a lesson (aversion therapy I suppose), but if they’d taken the uncovered wires away from the mouth of the toaster ten or twenty years before they did, I’d probably still be sticking all sorts of things into toasters.

Here’s an interesting entry I’ve been reading by .

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