In recent years the freeway system in Israel is applying some pretty good leading edge technology (including truly transparent wireless toll collection that is still missing in many countries I visit).
One interesting system can be seen in the Ayalon highway in Tel Aviv. This road has electronic signs that give precise real time information of the driving conditions ahead, including which lanes are jammed and how fast the traffic moves (when it does). Perhaps most impressive are the signs that give a taste of the despair lying ahead, as in “Traffic jammed through La Guardia exit”… not that there’s much you can do about it, admittedly, but at least you know!…
Photo: Wikimedia commons.
Of course, behind this capability lies a network of sensors and cameras, and an expert system that integrates them and recommends to the human operator at the road’s control center what messages to send to the signs (I thought the system was entirely automatic, but actually it does give a human final override). The information on the signs and the video from the cameras are also accessible on the Internet: the traffic flow conditions are updated every few minutes, and you can click the camera icons to see the real time video stream - and mouse over the “i” icons to see what text appears on each sign.
So, if quality is critical, how do we find the best tools?
One simple method is to go for the best makers; the ones the pros swear by. In my case I did that by interrogating my machine shop teacher in university, a master craftsman with decades of experience. Basically it went like this:
Me: what is the best make of hand files?
Master: why do you want to know? These are not for a hobbyist; they’d be too expensive for you anyway.
Me: Oh, I’m just curious.
Master: you aren’t going to buy them, Right?
Me: Perish the thought! I only want to know.
Master: You’re sure?
Me: Cross my heart.
Master: well, the best files are made by Nicholson; but you have to make sure it’s the Dutch Nicholson. Nicholson also has a factory in Canada, those are not quite as good.
Me: Thanks!
And then I’d rush off to buy some Dutch Nicholson files.
Those files serve me well to this day, though in all fairness, I suspect the Canadian ones would have served just as well…
Of all the everyday objects you will own, Tools deserve a place of honor, since they are the ones you use to make other
objects. In fact, tools are arguably what distinguished our hominid ancestors from the animals. For my part, as a maker of things for pleasure and work, tools - the workshop kind - have been my lifelong possessions and companions, so I will blog about them for a bit.
The first point I want to share should be obvious, yet as the massive commerce in low grade tools shows it certainly isn’t: when buying a tool, always go for the best quality available. It does make a huge difference.
Take the tool in the photo: a machinist’s square for metal work. It was made by Moore and Wright of Sheffield, a maker of precision tools since 1906. Now the first time I bought a machinist square (I was in my teens), it was much prettier than this one, and had a scale of centimeters along the edge too; it only had one drawback: it had an angle just short of 90 degrees. So I took it back to the store and got another, with an aluminum stock; this one was just over 90 degrees. Eventually I went to a better store and got the Moore & Wright: no scale, just an ugly lump of iron that tends to rust - but it still measures a precise straight angle after decades.
Or take the saw in this photo. I had a cheaper one, and it would use the same blades… only they would pop off the frame every so often. Only when I went and got this more expensive one, made by Eclipse, did the problem go away - and all it took was to have the little rods that go through the blade be longer! Little details like these make a big difference to tool usability and usefulness - and quality is all about the little details.
Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical - why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! - but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes.
Here is the trunk door on the previous model. The problem is, it is not spring loaded; to open it you had to press the lock button and then claw it open by trying to pry up the bottom edge, which is a tight fit to the bumper below it (on most cars the door at least has some depression, perhaps for the license plate, where you can grasp it; this door is smooth and lacks any such grab point).
Quite annoying, and a lovely bit of poor usability. In fact, I saw one of these cars on the road whose enterprising owner had screwed a handle - from a kitchen drawer, by the looks of it - onto this door!
So here is the same door on the new model. Same door - one key difference: now there is a depression in the bumper to allow you to grasp the door.
People must have been complaining - and the design team at Mazda had been listening. Better late than never!
“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. 
Many times, a small change in a design makes a product a lot better.
You know the modern version of the office water cooler: a vertical unit that dispenses cold (and in many models, also hot) water into disposable cups. Well, I’ve just seen one that made my day. The unit in the photo, a new model from Tami (a.k.a. Tana Water), has a small but smart addition: the button marked “Room Temp”.
What’s the big deal? Well, in most models, you push the button and get ice-cold water. This must be very attractive if you’ve just jumped off a camel at a desert oasis on a scalding summer day; but in most offices, which are air conditioned, you don’t need it to be ice-cold, and some prefer it not to be. Their solution in the past was to either try to add a little boiling water, or to sip slowly. So now Tami have added the Room Temp button - you can get the same clean, filtered water, without the extra cooling. A tiny redesign, leading to a better product.
My friend Jeff pointed out to me a novel implementation of a coffee-to-go carrying device, in use in a coffeeshop chain in Germany. The assembled device in use is actually less elegant than the usual little tray-with-handle cardboard carriers we’ve had for a long time; in fact you can’t even plop this one down on a tabletop at destination; you have to unload it with care. What makes this one worthy of mention in the elegant design category is a different aspect.
I refer of course to the extreme simplicity of assembly and disassembly - just two folds in a flat piece of cardboard, and you’re good to go; and at destination, if you’re green-minded, you can “disassemble” it by just flattening it out, and store it for future re-use with minimal fuss. The slit for paper napkins is another nice touch…
Sinn-Frei, via Oh Gizmo!
We like our cars to have large glove compartments, but when we cram stuff into them we can’t seem to find anything (a problem especially while driving). I recently drove a Chevrolet Optra, and it had an obvious solution: a divider, to split the compartment in two, like this:
But even nicer, the divider was removable, allowing you to recover the full width at will. Of course, drawers in office furniture have been doing this sort of thing for ages, and I’ve retrofitted homemade dividers to drawers in our home many times - it extends the usefulness of storage space significantly. However, this is the first time I see it in a car. Nice touch!
A riddle: what’s rectangular and flat, can fit in your pocket, and can calculate six-variable functions?
No, not a pocket calculator; I forgot to mention - it has no electronic components whatsoever.
Here, check it out in the latest addition to the HOC collection on my Possibly Interesting web site.
The wonders of the natural world are many, and the living body includes countless amazing features (and, admittedly, some not-so-amazing ones as well). Today I give due homage to a piece of truly elegant design: the perfect match of the outer ear to the iPod’s earphones!
The earphones’ convenient usage stems from the presence of those details of ear anatomy that form a perfect keyhole structure to hold the earbud in place just against the opening of the ear canal. The structure echoes (after a 180 degree turn) that seen on the backs of many wall-mounted household objects, like the fan seen in the photo below.
In case you wondered, the small folds in the outer ear’s convolutions that make this possible are called the Tragus and Anti-Tragus, as seen in this detailed illustration from Gray’s Anatomy. They hold the earphone’s round body in a snug fit against the suitably sized Concha.
We humans may not have the most impressive ears (just ask a bat, or a rabbit, or an elephant) but we certainly come pre-customized to hear our favorite music on the go!
