Nathan Zeldes blogs on everyday product design
I’ve already addressed pedestrian crossing signals in Germany, but here’s a truly surprising one, which I sighted in Munich.
So what does it mean? One can imagine what the intended usage is, but if one were to believe the images literally, this signal tells you when it’s OK to do acrobatic stunts on your bike in the middle of the road, and when it is not…
What a Circus-friendly city Munich must be! 
I was trying to find a parking spot in the parking garage under the Ramat Aviv shopping mall in Tel Aviv; this is a difficult task much of the time. But it was made very much easier because I discovered they have a truly wonderful system.
What you see here is that over each space they have a rod coming out from the ceiling with a lamp at its tip. A red light means the space is occupied; vacant spaces have a green light. So, as you drive around the claustrophobic maze you can see from far away where there is a free spot (and rush to get to it first!). Simple and ingenious!
As you see in the photo above, all spaces in sight are taken… so did I find a spot? indeed I have… as you can see in the next photo (at mid-left), the occasional green light does materialize!
The Herman Miller Aeron chair is a well known design icon with its unconventional appearance, its ventilated mesh fabric and its level of comfort (only rivalled, naturally, by its price tag). And of course, there are countless clones that emulate its mesh and looks at a lower cost. How far this copycat trend has gone I realized when confronted with the Graco Aerologic, a mesh chair with a classy name of its own. I was so impressed that I snapped some photos for your enjoyment:
Note how this chair has the same impressive mesh seat popularized by Herman Miller, as well as fancy faux leather padding on the back. This is a great executive chair… for babies, of course. No baby exec would enter his Rolls without one of these!
And as a last touch for the successful little angel, the Aerologic also comes with a vital accessory – a retractable cup holder. Two of them, in fact!
The 65 km trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv used to take two days on a donkey from biblical days to the 20th century. Then it went down to 3 hours by car in the fifties, then 2 hours, and finally below 60 minutes on the Highway 1 six-lane freeway. Then people bought more cars, and we’re back to 2 hours in the rush hour…
Enter the Fast Lane, which opened last week. This is an added lane on the last 13 km before Tel Aviv. It is open for free to car pools and public transport, and has a Park-and-Ride facility to boot. And all this is funded by tolls collected from the rest of us if we choose to use it.
But what happens in the rush hour, when everyone might want to use the new lane, bringing it to a standstill?
This is where the ingenuity shows. The toll is variable: it is posted on a large electronic sign ahead of the on ramp. When demand is low, it’s a reasonable 7 Shekels (about $2). When the lane fills up, it grows gradually up to a whopping 75 Shekels – more than enough to deter most drivers. The parameter defining the price is the speed of traffic flow in the fast lane itself, which is measured automatically at any moment; by using this to set the cost, a minimum speed of 70 kph is guaranteed by the company running the lane.
Here is the sign – in addition to a 7 Shekel price, it informs that traffic ahead is flowing (hence the low toll).
To an engineer, this is an obvious application of negative feedback to control a system; but it is rare to see such an elegant application of this concept where something as unpredictable as traffic congestion is controlled by a feedback loop incorporating automatic sensors and the trade-off between the factors of human impatience and human parsimony…
The “zebra” pedestrian crossing with its rectangular stripes is all too familiar. According to Wikipedia, it was introduced after WW2; but its roots appear much earlier in history…
During our recent tour of Pompeii I saw how the Romans approached the matter, which they did with their usual pragmatic attitude. Pompeii’s streets are paved with large black flagstones, and are flanked by tall sidewalks. And at frequent intervals these are connected by pedestrian crossings like these:
The similarity to our present day zebra crossing is striking, except that these stripes are as tall as the sidewalk and act as stepping stones. The reason is obvious: when the city was alive – before Vesuvius wiped it out with a belch – the streets must’ve been at various times packed with water, mud, trash and worse. The refined ladies who lived in the exquisite villas we see in ruin today were no doubt eager to keep their dainty sandals and flowing robes above street level as they went about their shopping.
And they had these crossings all over the town – from single-stone versions in smaller alleys to multiple crossings at large intersections, as you see below.
The nearer crossing in the last photo attests to another attribute of this design: note the deep narrow grooves along the road which go through the spaces between the stepping stones. The stones were spaced to the same width as the wheels on a standard cart, allowing wheeled traffic to drive through undisturbed, resulting in the eroded ruts you see in the photo.
I parked at an Intel plant in Israel, and was delighted to note some conveniently located parking spaces marked “Expecting mother”.
I just love this idea: employees carrying a next-generation employee inside certainly deserve this convenience. Besides, just because we provide parking for the handicapped (and very rightly so) doesn’t mean there aren’t other people in need of special consideration.
Well done, Intel!
My relatives returned from a trip to wonderful Firenze, and shared some terrible experiences trying to get their rental car back to the rental office in that ancient city’s dense traffic. Which brought to mind my own experience in the matter some years back.
I was trying to steer a course through all the one-way streets back to the car drop off location in downtown Florence, and no matter how hard I tried to navigate the narrow streets with my map, I always kept finding myself forced back to the same spot by the one-way street signs. The only way to the rental office seemed to be through a street blocked with a “no entry either way” sign.
It was only after the second or third try that I noticed a tiny text sign under the round no entry sign.
It said “except for car rental returns”.
In pure Italian...
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!
This morning I get in the good ol’ red Renault Clio, put it in reverse and start backing out, when the car emits a persistent beep.
I stop and scan the dashboard, and there I see a message on the alphanumeric display: Select Park. I do put the gear in Park, and everything is back to normal. I try to reverse again – beep and message return.
This makes very little sense, so I stop, pull out the owner’s manual and look for error messages. There is a pageful of them, but no mention of “Select Park”. I feel like those brisk officers in action dramas that say to their panicky men “Talk to me!”… but the car isn’t talkative, merely cryptic.
After a while I notice the overhead lamp is on, so I realize the door isn’t fully latched; I slam it shut, the car is happy, and I’m off to a day’s work. But the Select Park message is now a nominee for worst car error message ever. Consider:
Bottom line: error messages should explain causes, either directly (Door is open!) or indirectly (Close the door!). A message that essentially says “Freeze! Something is wrong!” is no good.
The other day I noticed a car whose side mirror had recently undergone some major trauma, losing its mirror and outer casing, ignominiously showing its guts. Here:
These electrically-operated mirrors are now ubiquitous, but this brought home the complexity of their inner mechanism, with the wiring, motors, pivots and the chassis that everything must screw onto.
Which made me think for a moment of how far forward – or is it backward? – we’ve come from the days of the simple mirrors still seen on vintage cars, as in the photo at right. In the fifties, a mirror was just that – a round sheet of silvered glass fixed in a round metal plate that pivoted on an arm. That was all – 4-5 parts, max, all externally visible. No innards at all. And cheaper to replace, I’m sure, than the bill the owner of the car in the first photo will face.
This growth in complexity is seen in all parts of our cars and other products. So speak up – is this trend a Good Thing (it is really comfy to move the mirror from inside the car, to be sure) or Bad (loss of elegance in design, for one thing)?
