Quantcast
Channel: Taran Rampersad - bureaucracy
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Designed To Fail

0
0

TypewriterI've been reading Don Norman's 'The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded Edition) and have enjoying it. As someone who has seen quite a few things that failed because of poor design over the years - fortunately none of them were mine (yet?) - it's an entertaining read. The 'Norman Doors' we all have encountered, where how to use the door is either misleading or not apparent, were named after the author of the book.

In fact, the image with this entry is one of the keys of a typewriter. The QWERTY keyboard you likely use every day was designed to keep the keys from sticking together. It was designed to slow typists.

But now that the mechanical keys no longer exist in this way, decades later... we still use QWERTY keyboards. Don't worry, so do I, but the point is that we are limited by a design that no longer need apply.

Some design issues have much more severe impacts. From the book (emphasis mine):

I was called upon to analyze the American nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island (the island name comes from the fact that it is located on a river, three miles south of Middletown in the state of Pennsylvania). In this incident, a rather simple mechanical failure was misdiagnosed. This lead to several days of difficulties and confusion, total destruction of the reactor, and a very close call to a severe radiation release, all of which brought the American nuclear power industry to a complete halt. The operators were blamed for these failures: "human error" was the immediate analysis. But the committe I was on discovered that the plant's control rooms were so poorly designed that the error was inevitable: design was at fault, not the operators. The moral was simple: we were designing things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people. But that's the difficult step for many engineers: machines are so logical, so orderly. If we didn't have people, everything would work so much better...

So far in reading I've noted that the designs described in the book are tangible. I deal with intangibles. Over the years, I've dealt with software, processes and other aspects of organizing data into information - and over time some of those become things that are 'designed to fail' as the world evolves around them. These deserve attention as well.

A piece of software that spams users with alerts is a piece of software that will annoy people. A software process that annoys developers will eventually be bypassed by the developers. A feature that was designed in can quickly become a bug. A bureaucracy designed not to change (read: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything ) can quickly become an impediment for progress and cause a level of frustration that almost any government office has been accused of.

Things change. Systems need to change with the times or they are designed to fail. Or, as you've probably heard someone say, 'Adapt or die.'

See also: Is you technology solving a problem or creating new ones?


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images