Here is a photo from a parking lot. As you see, one parking spot has been mutilated - apparently, as an afterthought - by sticking two poles in it.
The intent, clearly, is to keep a clear path to the stairs leading to the sidewalk above. A valid idea, but ill-executed in so many ways…
- This is a normally full lot. Given that, most drivers would much rather have an extra parking space available, and wiggle their way in between the cars on their way out.
- Possibly the idea is to allow access to people in wheelchairs or with baby prams, but if so, they should’ve built a ramp, not a staircase!
- The two poles are just far enough from the right edge of the space that sub-compact cars can and often do try to park anyway, thereby blocking the passage even worse than they would have absent the poles. If the designers wanted to ensure free passage, they should’ve used four poles, fencing a passage from the stairs that is wide enough for a person and definitely too narrow for a car.
- Of course, if they did that, they could’ve used much less width than is being wasted now…
Not rocket science, but it isn’t only in rocket design that it pays to think before doing things.
I found this setup in an office building. Ignore the shoddy execution of the cable conduit below, but ask yourself, what was this electrician thinking, when he mounted the power strip in this specific position above the conduit?!
So I was delighted to see 
As someone who spent a large chunk of lifetime working on improving knowledge worker effectiveness, especially around computer mediated communication and collaboration, I can barely contain my excitement. I’ve just sat through the lengthy video of yesterday’s unveiling of Google Wave in the I/O developer conference. Not only have the good folks at Google integrated the most central processes of Computer Supported Collaborative Work - Email, IM, Shared document editing, Discussion boards, and more - into a single tool; but they’ve upgraded their underlying paradigms - which had changed very little in decades - into a dynamic, vibrant usage model that takes advantage of the latest Web 2.0 concepts (and then some).
And guess what? It looks like it’s gonna be a good move in many ways. The “what can you possibly say in 140 characters” objection I’ve already taken care of when I became active on Facebook; The tools available, for the PC and for my mobile device, look excellent; many of my friends are already up there; and the interlinking of tweets, blog posts, facebook updates and even full length articles on my web site looks natural and promising.
Well, it would have been, if the designer had been thinking. You can see the problem in the next photo: most grounded mains plugs have the cable coming out the side - and this means the second socket in this panel is obstructed by this cable. All it would take to fix this is to build the panel the other way around, with the ground connections on the outside rather than facing the center, or better yet, place the two plugs side by side with the cables going down towards the floor. Cost and complexity of production would have been identical; usefulness would have doubled.