“O knob, thou whose perfect roundness doth . . .”
Nah. A poet I’m not. Still, I would if I could, because the round knob is a fast disappearing species, a trend well worthy of lament.
Throughout the 20th century the round control knob was a mainstay of human interface design for electronic devices. With good reason: it was perfectly suited to humans’ major feature, the opposable thumb. You grasped the knob between that thumb and forefinger and you had superb fine control of the knob’s angular position. If the function called for finer control, you just used a fatter knob. At the machine end of this human/machine interface the knob could rotate a switch, a variable capacitor, or a potentiometer - there were many analog devices back then that lent themselves well to rotary control.
Today most of our input components have gone digital, and are either computer controlled or handled by pushbutton switches. This makes sense in some cases, but there are still many situations when a function is intrinsically analog (say, a volume control on a car radio) yet the designers are making the controls digital (say, by using a pair of + and - pushbuttons). This is pure evil from a human engineering perspective: the round knob is much more intuitive, convenient, and faster to boot. And it really was worthy of the name control: it gave the user a sense of controlling the instrument, instead of fighting it…
I’m sure the electronics driving the volume these days are fully digital, but even so a round knob with some D/A conversion is the correct choice. It must also be more expensive to make, because the radio makers - preferring low cost to user experience - increasingly shy away from it. 
I was putting in order our bookcase of Science Fiction, and noticed an interesting fact best illustrated by the two piles of books in the photo.
One pile has three books, all written after 1980. The other has eight books written in the fifties, the later part of the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction. And the two piles are the same height.
Fact is, most paperbacks published recently tend to be much longer than the “Pocket books” of the fifties. They can easily exceed 400 pages, where their predecessors ran happily to 200 or so. And the sad thing is, this does not make them better. The three fat books in the pile at left are certainly good - but the other pile contains absolute classics like Bradbury’s The illustrated man, Clarke’s Childhood’s end, and Asimov’s I, Robot (the wonderful short story collection, not the silly movie); the others, by such masters as Sturgeon, Heinlein, Blish and Wyndham were likewise influential and a joy to read.
Here, go read Footfall (1985), all 700 pages of it, and Wolfbane (1959), with a mere 160; both are wildly imaginative works, good SciFi indeed, but the GPP (goodness density per page) is on the skinny tome’s side. In fact, it makes me wonder, why did authors become so much more verbose of late? Any ideas?
Dominic Tramontana has posted an interesting analysis of how the Reload glyph varies between browsers; take a look! Dominic asked me to post a screen shot I have of NCSA Mosaic, the first graphic web browser developed in 1993 by Marc Andreessen.
The grab I dug up is of a Novell web page, from early 1995. Here it is (click image to see the full page).
Back then, black on gray was the accepted way to write a web page, and the use of the red “book” images was a really impressive touch, I recall. We’ve come a long way…
In the old days electronic gear had on/off switches that were actually physical devices with two positions, like the light switch on a wall. Nowadays these have become a rare sight: with everything computerized, most state switching is done by pressing pushbuttons and keys, with the switching done by the logic circuitry or microprocessor.
The disadvantage of this solution is that (a) you can’t tell the state of a switch by looking at it, and (b) the act of switching can take a while as the computer goes about its activity. Even the basic act of turning a computer off now takes long moments (in the original home computers you hit the switch and power was simply cut off).
Here is a delightful exception to this trend: my latest Notebook, a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, has a slide switch on its outside for switching the Wireless radios on and off. Slide it to the right and the radio pops on instantly (as indicated by a green spot that becomes exposed under the slider). Slide to the left and the radio shuts down. Besides being fast and convenient, this is very useful when flying: if you believe in the inadvisability of having the Wireless on during flight, you can ensure it is off (and will stay off) before even turning the Notebook on. Absent this assertive hard switch, you’d need to turn the computer on, discover you left the radio on when you last put it into standby in the airport, and then you’d need to fumble with soft switches and dialogs to turn it off before the plane crashed. 
Reuse is good, right? And the notion conjures in most of us an image of linking code modules. Which is why I was astounded to run into the following case, while touring the beautiful island of Sicily.
Here you see your intrepid tourist in front of the Duomo (cathedral) of Siracusa, the city where Archimedes lived, engineered, and famously died defending his sand drawings. The baroque facade is a late addition (18th century) and nothing to write home about; but to its left there’s something unique and bizarre…
Below, left, is a close-up of the left wall of the Duomo. Note the embedded Doric columns, visible with their abaci and architrave (don’t worry, I had to look that up myself). These are also visible on the inside of the church, as seen in the photo at right.
So what’s going on? Well, the church was built in the 7th century AD. The columns, however, predate it by more than a millennium; they are what’s left of a Greek temple dedicated to Athena, which was built in the 5th century BC. Rather than follow the destroy-and-recycle method often applied to preceding cultures, the Christians reused the framework of the temple as is, filling in the spaces between the columns!
So we’ve made the move to flat computer screens, which have many advantages over their bulky CRT ancestors; but the vendors pulled a fast one on us when it comes to the controls for adjusting the screen’s image.
In the good ol’days, every monitor had at least two round knobs, one for contrast, one for brightness. This is as good as it gets from a human engineering perspective. You just twiddle the knobs back and forth until your eyes tell your brain to tell your fingers to stop right there. Today, we have instead an On-screen Display (OSD), which some vendors tout as a good thing; in reality it is slow, unfriendly and confusing. The idea is that you use a line of pushbuttons the navigate a hierarchy of menus just to get to the function you need, and then you need to click a good deal more to effect the adjustment. To make sure this is easy, the buttons are often labeled by cryptic symbols in near-invisible relief (as in the photo below, of my Samsung SyncMaster 913N); and the logic they use, though simple, is far from intuitive. This may be justified - indeed inevitable - for accessing the numerous advanced functions that did not exist in the CRT days; but couldn’t they have left alone those more basic controls?
That’s progress for you (sigh)…
So, what can we do about this? Adding analog controls is not realistic on these super-integrated monitors. The only thing left, which actually removes much of the confusion, is to do what the vendor should have done - mark the controls with visible labels, as I’ve done:
We humans have this obsession with designing new products, even though many of them die out after a while (some, mercifully, after a very short while!) However, every so often a design is found that is simply so good and sensible that it stays around for a long, long time.
So, here’s an example I ran into in the archaeological museum in Agrigento, Sicily, a town founded by the ancient Greeks.
The object on the left is a bronze Fibula, made in the 13th century BC. Not one in a thousand people today would recognize the word “Fibula”, but hardly anyone would fail to identify this as a large safety pin. In fact, I saw not one but many of these, in various museums in Europe: they were widely used for many centuries. The second photo shows one from the 8th Century BC, with a more imaginative design (remember, unlike our safety pins these were also meant for decorative effect as fasteners for cloaks and such).
And for all our digital innovations, and perhaps unlike many of them, I doubt this good ol’ design is going to be supplanted anytime soon…
When Johannes Gutenberg gave us the printing press in the 15th century, he also invented a suitable ink to go along with it. His ink was a glossy black, and the idea of printing books in black on white paper has remained ever since, because that is by definition the highest contrast you can get, hence easy to read. Millions of books have appeared since Gutenberg, spanning a huge range of subjects and world views, but they did not differ in ink color one bit as the centuries came and went.
Lately, however, I notice a worrying trend as I browse the shelves in the bookstores I frequent. A small but growing number of books are published in all sorts of smart-aleck color schemes. Ignoring the ones on colored paper - where the color schemes are intentionally artsy - we see books in gray ink, blue ink, brownish ink, all on white paper. And not just a sidebar or special page; the entire book is printed this way, as if the publisher said to himself “Hmmm… how can I improve the reading experience? Ah! Let’s use a lower contrast ink than we might. Sure, gray ink may cost more than the standard black, but what’s a little money compared to the pleasure of giving my readers eye strain headaches?”
Bad, bad idea. Give us books in good old black on white!
Everyone uses the 3M Post-it note, and it’s often used as an example of the role of serendipity in product development - and of the wisdom of maintaining a corporate culture that encourages and empowers the pursuit of such serendipity.
But the Post-it note story has another interesting lesson, and it has to do with the degradation of the design of its packaging. The original version of the ubiquitous 100-note packet was wrapped in cellophane, with the highly original trick that you could open it by grabbing the packet with two hands on opposite sides, and cracking the cellophane open with a single rapid twist, rotating the two ends in opposing directions. This was by design; in fact, I recall it said so explicitly on the packet. It was the fastest, easiest way to open a cellophane wrapping that I ever saw; and whenever I did the little twist I felt a twinge of admiration for its designer (and perhaps a bit of triumphant gloating over the cellophane, a wrapping material noted for its unfriendliness - think “CD Jewel Case”).
So guess what? A few years ago 3M did away with this method. Now they provide the usual thin strip whose end you need to pry loose and pull. Sure, it’s no big deal; but the new method is more complicated to manufacture, slightly harder to use, and, above all, is less elegant .
I’m disappointed in 3M: when you got a good thing, you shouldn’t mess with it. But if you must mess with it, can’t you go forward, not backward, in simplicity and functionality?
The evolution of the On/Off power switch symbol
We all know the symbol with a vertical line in a circle: it identifies the On/Off power switch. It occurred to me that this familiar symbol is evolving in a bizarre fashion.
Originally, switches had a lever or slider that could move to either of two physical positions. In those days the switch was marked with the word POWER and its positions with ON and OFF. Then, as switches became smaller and more globalized, the two words were replaced with 1 and 0, as seen even today on many rocker switches.
And then the ubiquity of microprocessors made it more economic to do everything with momentary pushbutton switches; the computer inside could take care of figuring whether you meant ON or OFF. And so, the button now needed an icon that conveys both options; I surmise that is when the familiar “1-inside-a-0″ symbol came into existence (if you know otherwise do share in the comments!) This round icon fit nicely on round buttons, and became ubiquitous.
But then we start to see the form shown in the two photos above right: a bastardized version combining the 1-in-a-circle with a 1 in the same symbol. This makes no sense at all - the correct representation would have been 1/0, for On slash Off. Instead we get On slash OnOff. Sloppy thinking…
Such erroneous contractions are often seen in spoken language - as in “IT technology”, which expands to “information technology technology” (there’s even a company by that name, and its slogan, amusingly, is “We make sense of IT“). But now we see the same error invading the more compact space of visual symbols…