Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

Intriguing objects at Possibly Interesting site

March 31, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Glass cup Do you recognize the glass object in this photo? If not, you may want to check “Prey to Oblivion“, the March article on my Possibly Interesting web site, which has a bunch of everyday objects that were quite familiar a century ago but are now all but forgotten.

To avoid confusion:

This here Commonsense Design is my blog, updated with new brief posts a few times a week.
Possibly Interesting is my personal web site, where I post hopefully interesting but longer articles once a month.

I figure I should cross-post a link to the blog when an article of interest comes up on the other site.

User-centered design: a serious lapse

March 28, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

And now, from the murky past, a serious lapse in designing for the intended user… Toddler on Bench

When my son was a toddler, many years ago, he had this habit of going into my den in my absence, climbing onto the lab bench and wreaking havoc (here, I once captured him on film reaching for a hammer).

Well, I had to protect kid and gear, and I had this idea to build an anti-toddler alarm system that would raise an alert if the kid went into the den without an accompanying adult. My design had two infrared beams crossing the door at different heights, and a control box complete with a cackle generator (to issue a sound like an angry hen when the alarm was triggered). When it was finished, I painstakingly built four lens assemblies for the IR beams, rigged them around the door frame, and prepared to have some fun. Cool, huh?…

Yah. The thing lasted for less than a day. As soon as the kid (did I say he’s very smart?) went on the prowl he spied the interesting new things on the door frame, decided they were worth studying, and tore them off the door to facilitate examination. I wasn’t in the mood to devise hardened housings, so that was the end of the project.

We tend to think of User-centered design as making life easy for the user. Evidently, you also have to ensure the system can survive its intended users!

The first post

February 29, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

A new blog… like a newborn baby: you have high hopes for it, but you can’t really imagine what it will turn out like. You just have to nurture it as best you can, then wait and see.

I’m a technologist. I grew up immersed in the wonderful hobby of amateur radio, graduated in applied science, worked all my life in high tech settings. And I’ve always had this fascination with Human Factors Engineering; that is, applying the basic technologies in a way that makes sense from a human perspective, that makes its use by people easy and intuitive and efficient and – inevitably, to my way of thinking – enjoyable. Unfortunately, while I can strive for this goal in my own products at work and at home, I keep running into commercial products that violate it in diverse and bizarre ways, and into trends that make promising technology evolve into a real pain.

I hope to make this blog into a channel where I can share my thoughts – opinionated ones, in many cases, but still relevant, I hope – about improving the design of many everyday products that surround us, and about the less common cases where a really good design makes my day.

I hope you, my readers, will find all this sufficiently interesting to chime in and make this a lively dialog, maybe even one that can make product developers pay attention to our need for more usable products. Welcome to my blog!