Saw the panels below by an elevator. The left one is the familiar elevator control; the one on the right, however, uses fake buttons and reads: “Before you press, think of your health – use the stairs!”
Good advice, nicely implemented…
Archive for the 'Good design' Category
We were in a large drugstore in Germany, when I noticed that all the shopping carts had a large magnifier lens attached to them, like this:
The magnifiers were fitted in a sturdy and elegant holder, designed to allow the carts to be stacked in a row as usual.
This was a new one for me… and it took me a moment to figure out the reason: these guys wanted their clients – even the elderly with their imperfect vision – to be able to read the fine print on the medicine packages.
I admit I was impressed that they care!
We all know the paper towel dispensers that you crank to get the required length out. The more sophisticated ones dispense with the crank action and use an electric motor actuated by a proximity detector: wave your hand in the air in front of the machine and out comes the preset length of paper with a satisfying whirring sound. Hygienic, neat, and foolproof.
But even with this foolproof concept there are different designs. The device at the left in the photo tells you to wave your hand to the right of the paper outlet slot. The one at the right has the sensor centered above the slot’s middle. Why does this matter? because the average person will reach out for where the paper is expected; with the second unit this will trigger the sensor, whereas with the first, it will not. Then you have to start groping and try to figure it out, and maybe notice the frantic effort the vendor made to guide you: the picture of a hand titled “sensor”, the big blue arrow pointing to it, and the text captions that try to make it all clear.
All nice and good, but a towel dispenser is not a literary work, and should not rely on texts and explanations. Had they put the sensor in the middle all this would’ve been unnecessary…
Many small appliances can benefit from an off-device mains switch, and these are often put on the power cable, or – more rarely – on the wall outlet. But in a trip to Germany I witnessed a nice twist on this theme: putting the switch right on the 220V mains plug at the end of the cable. This was done without in any way increasing the size of the standard plug; and of course it means you could retrofit such switches to any device by replacing a plug, a simpler operation than replacing a wall outlet or messing with the cable in between the device and the plug. Nice product!
I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever.
That was then. Now Semantinet, the start-up in Herzliya where I work one day each week, has packaged the capability as a Wordpress plugin, which means that a blogger can add the capability to any Wordpress blog in a mere minute or two. If you have a Wordpress blog, you can download the plugin here.
What’s more, the product had evolved, and it now includes a tab called “friends” in addition to the ones for photos, videos, and the rest. This tab – once you connect it to your Facebook account – shows you how the entity being viewed is connected to the people you know, like which of your friends live in the place or work at the company.
Pretty powerful capability – and easier than ever to include. Which is what I just did – mouse over the marked up words anywhere on this blog and see it in action!
More from Amir’s visit to Japan:
This staircase gives access to the trains at a Tokyo underground station. Given rush hour crowd density, its designers did well to split it in two, to separate the up and down streams of commuters.
But note how the two sides are of different width. Someone characterized the traffic and found that at peak times more people will be going up than down. Other staircases might have the reverse arrangement, each optimized to its location and usage. These designers took a scarce resource, in this case stairwell width, and allocated it in a totally optimized manner; a very Japanese (and very intelligent) design approach.
Amir is back from Japan, and sent in some interesting photos attesting to that country’s outstanding and different ways of solving life’s daily problems.
For starters, here is yellow path marked out on a Tokyo sidewalk, whose surface is textured with the little rubber bumps that are so annoying at some airport terminals. Turns out these strips are quite common in major cities in Japan.
This is not a way to mark the road to the Wizard of Oz; it has a very practical and worthwhile function: it allows blind or low-vision individuals to find their way safely. The bumps have different patterns where the trail changes direction – they are linear on the straight and round at intersections, allowing the users to sense through their feet where they should pay attention.
In addition, the strips continue in public buildings like railway stations, where they mark the way to the ticket office and other key locations. There are also plaques with Braille directions in strategic locations along the paths. The photo below is from the train station at Kurashiki.
That is one simple, ingenious and commendable practice that other nations ought to emulate!
A piece of thoughtful design on the Renault Clio:
When you activate the windshield washer, the fluid is squirted onto the glass and the wipers are activated for four consecutive cycles. This is pretty much standard these days. But in the Clio, they then rest for three seconds, and give the windshield another single wipe.
The added wipe gets rid of the annoying trickle of fluid that often forms at the top center of the windshield after the first wash/wipe action. It’s not hard for the driver to reactivate the wipers, but the Renault designers took care of it for us. Good thinking!
Our supermarket provides a large billboard for public use, where people post the usual mix of personal ads of all kinds. So many of them, in fact, that any one ad is likely to get drowned or covered by other ads before the day is out.
So here’s one person that solved this problem in an original way, providing their ad with a unique chance to register on people’s eyeballs.
I was walking up the ramp at the left in the photo above, which leads to the supermarket’s main doors, and I saw at my feet the ad in the photo, taped right to the metal ramp. It advertises a flat for rent – and no shopper coming that way can fail to notice it. Wayda go!
We needed a standing lamp for the living room, and went shopping. We started with some of the larger lighting stores around town, and found a great many lamps, mostly imported from China. Like most manufactured goods today they were inexpensive and looked like they would do the job – for a while. The workmanship was usually shoddy and of course there was nobody to tell that I prefer the on/off switch to be just at this height, and I need a longer electric cord, and would love it if the lampshade were just a bit wider…
After a while we were beginning to consider compromising, but decided to first try Karl Marx. This is a small old style shop in downtown Jerusalem; it has been there forever, and I never entered it, though it did attract my occasional amused glance because of the coincidence of its founder’s name.
The shop occupied a tiny room crammed so tight with lamps and lampshades that one could barely stand in it (the photo doesn’t begin to convey this). And there we found a lamp we liked, which we could get with any shade we wished, because they’re made to order by the owners; in fact, we were guided courteously through all the possibilities and ordered one decorated to our specification with a frieze in a color and style to match our living room rug. And of course they promised to construct it with the switch where I wanted it, the cord the needed length, and so forth. The quality and workmanship, too, were perfect.
This is one of those old fashioned Mom and Pop businesses that represent the skill and dedication of a lifetime (or more), and produce goods handmade to a standard no longer seen in the mass-produced disposable products that flood the large chains. I should be sad discussing it, because these wonderful shops are fast disappearing; but I’m too delighted in the excellent lamp Messrs. Marx made for us!
