Beach Haven

While my wife and I traveled this past Christmas we stayed at several hotels. At one of them something unexpected happened. After getting there late at night, and waking up tired the next morning, I prepared for a shower. It was one of those that has a single handle you just twist. The position of the knob determines the temperature of the water. When plumbed normally, you twist counterclockwise and the water progresses from cold, through warm, and landing on hot. I turned the knob all the way to the hot position waiting for the water to warm up. It didn’t. Instead, the water remained icy cold. This was not the best outcome first thing in the morning. I began to twist it clockwise, back toward off, when the water began to warm. It was obvious the shower was plumbed backwards. When the knob was in the red zone the water was cold, and when it was in the blue zone the water was hot. I thought to myself, why would they not take the short time necessary to simply remove the valve, flip it around, and reinstall it? I know how that works as we had the same problem in our Georgia home when we first moved in 18 years ago.

After my shower and breakfast, I returned to the bathroom and then I noticed it. Right above the shower knob was a sticker warning the reader that the plumbing was backwards. Instead of fixing it they just shared the unexpected status. I thought how interesting it was that the whole time I fiddled with the knob I never even noticed the sticker. I learned through experience the mistake despite someone’s attempt to warn me. Seems like we see what we look for, and miss what we don’t look for, even when the thing we don’t see is right in front of us.

From Matthew 13
14 And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:
15 For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.
16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

I hope we are looking for those things that Heavenly Father wants to teach us. I’m sure I miss plenty of opportunities to learn since sometimes I have eyes but see not. 
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​I embrace new tech. That said, I think too often we can be tempted to dump ‘better’ legacy tech in favor of the latest and greatest. We are tempted to move to new tech because it’s new.  The old curmudgeon in me has made me more skeptical of shiny things or change for change’s sake. It seems I’m not alone. IEEE’s Gwendolyn Rak recently interviewed Rachel Plotnick who has been considering how buttons once replaced by touch screens are making a comeback.

Here’s the link to the full interview:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens

“One of the biggest observations I made was that a lot of fears and fantasies around pushing buttons were the same 100 years ago as they are today. I expected to see this society that wildly transformed and used buttons in such a different way, but I saw these persistent anxieties over time about control and who gets to push the button, and also these pleasures around button pushing that we can use for advertising and to make technology simpler. That pendulum swing between fantasy and fear, pleasure and panic, and how those themes persisted over more than a century was what really interested me. I liked seeing the connections between the past and the present.”

Plotnik notes how touch screens are more visual than tactile. This can make user interfaces difficult for visually impaired. Button are purely tactile.

“If you look at gamers playing video games, they want to push a lot of buttons on those controls. And if you look at DJs and digital musicians, they have endless amounts of buttons and joysticks and dials to make music. There seems to be this kind of richness of the tactile experience that’s afforded by pushing buttons. They’re not perfect for every situation, but I think increasingly, we’re realizing the merit that the interface offers.”

Personally, I tend to be agnostic when it comes to human interface with machines, specifically my human interfaces. However, I have long worried about the risk of losing a screen causing a total loss of the device it controls. I also don’t like distractions while driving. Looking at a touch screen on a phone has caused way more accidents than the half second it takes to find the volume or tuning knob on a car dashboard. Once you touch an actual button there is no longer need to look at it while using it.

“I like the idea that people who are in the humanities studying these things from a long-term perspective can also speak to engineers trying to build these devices.” That is, if engineering departments take user-experience feedback into account. There are plenty of designers out there who feel they ‘know better’ than the people who receive the devices and software they are cranking out. I would argue that sometimes there is more in the field of design about keeping up with the Jones’ than listening to consumers.
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For a number of years, I attended the Washington DC auto show. I did this not to look at the cars, but to check out the ‘infotainment’ systems (also known as head units) in the dashboards. In my role at NPR back then I was interested in how our over-the-air audio and metadata was being displayed in the menu system of each car. The trend setters were definitely de-buttanizing back then. I’m happy to hear in this interview that the opposite may be happening now. Maybe it’s ok that I held onto that large stereo system in our family room. As the saying goes, ‘everything old is new again’.

For some time I've been writing the occasional story of something happening that was unintended. Along the way I've been seeing many instances of the unexpected that have nothing to do with what someone may have intended, but have passed the story by because it seemed outside the original idea of 'unintended'. In fact, 'unintended' stories are really just a subset of 'unexpected' stories. With that in mind the blog search now includes a topic of 'unexpected' and I won't publish any more stories under the 'unintended' moniker. I already have a few in the hopper I can start with in a week or two. Stay tuned.