Yesterday I went with four friends to the annual antique
farm equipment show in Tulare California— an important cultural event. I drove.
We are all hobbyists at restoring old machinery, particularly vehicles.
Two of us are a professor emeritus in the Anesthesiology Department and his
grandson, who is about to enter medical school. Two of us are on the faculty of
the Design Group of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford. I am a
professor emeritus from the Engineering School with a large amount of experience in
design and consulting in industry, including a bit of time in automotive design. Why do I mention this? Because I am going to say something about
cars, other products of industry, innovation, and standardization in this post
and the next, and I want to establish some credibility.
Since there are five of us, since we were going to drive a bit over 500 miles in a day, and since we are reasonably large people that did not seem to all fit in any of our family cars, we rented a 2013 SUV with only 1700 miles on it made by a well known and loved U.S. company. The good news was that it was a relative joy to drive, compared with other “big” cars, and quite comfortable with only a few annoyances, such as the requirement of a strange move to kill the turn signals after passing another car, and the need to sacrifice the center of the back seat if coffee cup holders were wanted. But there was some less good news.
Fortunately I asked the person in the group who has the most experience with cars made by this company, and is very knowledgeable about things technical, to sit in the front seat and be responsible for what is often now called “the information system”. Otherwise, I might have killed all of us.
Happily for we humans, the layout of automotive controls has been quite standardized for some time, due to the mechanical nature of the links between the controls and the device being controlled. There is less of that as time goes by, because digital electronics have made it possible and in many ways convenient to control various functions electrically. Steering is still somewhat traditional, although augmented and input by various electrical inputs. Soon, if not now, it may be possible to steer your car with your nose, movements of your eyes, or your voice.
I do hope we don’t. The investment in , for instance, steering a car with a traditional steering wheel is huge, represents billions of years of acquiring automatic responses among members of the human race, and whether the “best way” or not, is somewhat like the QUERTY keyboard system, in that a change would result in a great loss of learned skill. And if you make a mistake with a keyboard, it is easily repairable. If you make a mistake steering a car while learning a radical new approach to control, you may not only die, but take a number of innocent people with you.
Admittedly, my problems with this car were somewhat due to the fact that it was a rental. If I owned it, I would have had the time to learn to communicate with it. But I often rent cars and more and more people are sharing cars. And I spent a day and 500 miles with it. My problems began when I brought it home one evening in the dark in order to be able to leave on our trip very early in the morning. Starting it at the rental agency was straight forward, but of course I couldn’t just turn the lights off when I arrived home. Failing to turn them off made me begin to worry about the state of the battery in the morning, but I wisely decided that the car would turn them off when it was good and ready, went upstairs and watched it, and sure enough after a while (the programmed delay), it did so. I figured I should learn a bit more about the car, and of course there was no owner’s manual in the car (usually the case with rental cars), so I went on the internet and after passing up several opportunities to buy a manual for $30 I finally found an online copy I could read for free. It had some 450 pages, of which many had to do with the “information system”, including how to program the delay in the lights (not straight forward) and such things.
Now realizing that the car was going to obey basic inputs from me, and I had no hope of learning to control the bells and whistles on the car before we left, I accepted the fact that it would insist on making many decisions itself, so slightly before dawn we left for our trip, and I happily watched my information officer buried in the information system— this being the case even though the rental car had minimal features. I kept imagining him not only having to do with things such as trip meters, mileage estimates, the interior “climate” and telling me where the hell the odometer was, but the nature of his job if we had faced a complicated route and had a navigation system he had never seen, and all our cell phones were hooked to the car. And then of course, I entertained myself thinking about the fantasy of doing what he was doing and also trying to drive.
Car manufacturers are well aware of the “diversion” problem. Cars are supposed to keep people safe, but the very same people are demanding things ranging from on-board cell phone service to information on the state of the vehicle, to music and TV, as well as the time-honored right to interact with each other and offer leaking sandwiches to the driver. But vehicles are not the only products under attack. Standardization and control/display simplification, time honored ways of improving the ability to perform tasks, especially in the case where multiple operators of the same equipment are involved, are being destroyed by the present wave of worship for creativity and innovation. There used to be a very active field called human engineering that dealt with such things. The publications still exist, and subsets of technical societies still exist, but human engineering matured as a field, and although it left very reasonable and one-time agreed upon rules about the interaction between controls, displays, and human operators, many designers seem to have no knowledge of this. It was once agreed upon that once a reasonably optimal solution was reached, standardization was extremely valuable (older radios and automobile controls and displays). Ålthough is to some extent still the case in such products as airplanes and military vehicles, the wide application of this philosophy to a wide range of products was before the days of apps, gigabytes, and electronic chips that offered almost free electronic components.
The argument goes that standardization stands in the way of creativity, innovation, and change. Nuts! Industrial products are supposed to improve the quality of our life, not confuse us as we try to use radios in strange cars and set the wake-up alarm in strange hotels. We are too good to have to figure out such things. I don’t want to have to figure out whether the red line under the seat symbol means I am controlling the seat warmer or telling me how warm it is. I have a knob on the dashboard of my 2011 Toyota (not that old) that has a diagram of a fan on it. Happily if I turn it to the right, the fan blows harder. I am beginning to love that knob. In our rental car, after one found the “climate” screen, there was indeed a tiny diagram of a fan (among a very large number of tiny diagrams), but it was not clear how one varied the strange bar chart next to it, or if in fact that bar chart had anything at all to do with the fan.
As you can guess I view this apparent forgetfulness of what we once believed as a cause for a decrease in the human fit in technical products, ranging from computers to dish washers to hand guns to fork lifts to bottle caps. Maybe you are a product designer that has an unusually brilliant and creative idea for how to control a product, but are you sure that the brilliance is universally obvious? And do we all have to learn it if we have reduced the present idea to adequately rapid unconscious response?
On my trip yesterday, since it would begin and end in the dark, I took along a flashlight, as I have learned one is useful in trying to find and read “creatively” designed controls in a rental car at night. The flashlight was not one I usually use in the house. I am not even sure where it came from. It was a nice looking flashlight— bright, LED’s, rugged, impact-resistant case with particularly resilient material on the bottom end. By groping around in the dark, I finally discovered that to turn it on you pushed on the resilient bottom end. On looking at it later in the light, I realized the switch symbol for “on” was worked nicely into the resilient material — black on black.
Maybe an obvious place for a switch. But I have spent my whole life finding flashlight switches (slider, button, etc) on the side where my thumb is. And the bottom position is not reachable by the hand holding the flashlight in the normal way —a bit annoying if one is carrying something in the other hand. Creativity? I’ve got enough to worry about in life without trying to find a switch in the dark that is subtly integrated into the case of a flashlight in a position the hand holding the flashlight cannot easily reach. I’ll sure never buy one like it.
I’ll call my next post Quality and the Internet. We have to start thinking harder about our expectations of our brains, since they are not doubling their neurons at the same rate as digital hardware and software are doubling their capability.
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