Thought Experiment: Driverless automated cars

In the linked article you can read about driver less pods at Heathrow airport that take passengers from the car park to the terminal. Driver less automated pods are certainly part of the future, one day they may even replace ordinary cars on ordinary roads.

However here is a thought, a driver less pod will always be programmed to stop for a pedestrian / obstruction as the whole point in driver less pods is to prevent accidents. This all sounds very sensible and logical but what happens when pedestrians know they can never be hit by a car. Simple, they will step out into the road without looking as they know any car will stop and they cannot be hurt.

Now extend this thought, which basically means that pedestrians now have priority. In towns and cities pedestrians would reclaim the streets, traffic would be brought to a stand still and the whole fabric of society would break down. Ok maybe not that last part.

So if cars are no longer dangerous pedestrians would no longer be wary of them. You could either

a) Trust pedestrians to do the right thing - make it socially unacceptable.
b) Allow cars to be slightly dangerous again.
c) Make it a serious criminal offence to cross the road when a driver less car is coming.
d) Or another option which I haven't yet thought of.

Its an interesting thought which may have to be solved before driver less cars go mainstream.

Humanistic design - Part 2

In a previous article I wrote about how we associate different sounds with different objects and even when those sounds are no longer made due to developments in technology we still associate the sound with a quality product. Thus product designers add these sounds back in artificially so that we continue to make the quality connection.

Partly this is due to the human failing of not feeling comfortable with change. The absence of something that has always been there makes us feel slightly uncomfortable even though we may not fully make the connection between what is missing and the feeling. A good example of this is yesterday when I was driving home the car sounded different, the engine noise was different, I started wondering whether there was anything wrong with the engine, was it as responsive as normal, I started to feel uncomfortable.

The answer to this ,which dawned on me eventually, was that I had forgotten to turn the radio on. So I turned it on and everything returned to normal.

Now imagine a day when I get into my first electric car, I turn the engine on and apart from a click, there is no noise, I will feel slightly uncomfortable. I might not even buy the car if I was looking for a new one. This for designers is the ultimate nightmare.

So they are looking at making electric cars sound like traditional cars with engine noises. For two reasons, one is that the driver wont be put off buying them and secondly that a pedestrian can hear the car coming. When you can choose the engine noise or download the latest engine noise from the internet things might feel a bit weird.

For sports car models they are even thinking about creating a throaty engine roar, as after all, everyone knows the best sports cars have the throaty roars.

How engineers create artificial sounds to fool us (BBC)

Anyway I digress, the whole point of this article was to post an interesting follow up to my original article. The BBC have posted up a similar article with a few extra quotes and examples.

The car door example is one I found very interesting as Professor Cox is right, car doors should have a solid clunk to them. There have even been advertising campaigns based around the sound of the closing car door clunk.

I also love the fact that Harley Davidson are quoted as saying they won in the court of public opinion. In other words technically they didn't win according to the law.  Anybody can win a popularity context without being great at what they do, or right, or talented just check out the numerous winners of various reality talent competitions.

My Creative boost

One of my mini web projects which is very creative but very unpopular is my creative boost. Basically when you press the boost me! button it shows you a picture which inspires you or makes you think. Each picture is a little amuse bouche for the mind.

Here are some of the ones I have added recently:


Image 77 - What is your escape plan?

Image 76 - Naked

Image 75 - Reverse Pschology

Image 74 - Subliminal advertising

Image 73 - UK General Election Result

Intertwined colour lines: a fascination

I find myself strangely fascinated by coloured lines intertwined together, especially if it is a pattern based on something man made or familiar to me.

This is a hand drawn colour line copy of a 1914 clearing house railway junction diagram of the area around clapham junction (the big confusing area over on the left). If you want to you can compare it to the original over here on wikipedia.

Maybe I have discovered a whole new art form with which you can experiment with on any map or satelitte photgraphy, just drawing designs. Today the web tommorrow Tate Britain.

The garlic bread older than me

I had a lovely M & S garlic and parsley baguette last night and while searching for the heating instructions noticed that it was:



Which would make it firstly a very well preserved baguette suitable for decades long space missions and secondly means that the baguette has been around several years longer than me.

Of course it is more likely just to be a product code or factory code and someone did not think through the unintended consequences of the layout of the packaging.

Creative boost - revitalise the creative thought process

Announcing the launch of my latest web project.

This is a quirky little site based around random images designed to boost the brain, by making you think or perhaps look at things from a different perspective.

At the moment there are 40 random images but I am expanding them as I go and have invited other people to submit their own.

The best thing to do is go and have a look and see what you think.

Dear Google,

This is an open letter, mainly because I couldn't easily find out how to contact them.

I have several google things running and it would be really nice to switch between products via the my account link or even better some kind of drop down menu.

However the menu they do have which works very nicely isn't consistent across the product range. In some it is there in others it is the proverbial vanishing lady.

This is very un-google like behaviour, a simple solution that isn't properly integrated across the product range.

Anyway just to keep it simple, this small menu should always be in the top right hand corner of the screen no matter what part of google you are in so you can always get back to your 'my account' screen.


p.s. its not click able, its an image.

p.p.s. google should read this post within a day or so via the googlebot, but will anyone from google ever read the page and do something about it. Secondly, how long will it take them?

Camping for yummy mummies (The Guardian)

Don't let the title of the article put you off. This is the halfway house between a tent and a cottage, a rather posh tent with wooden floors and wood burning stove.

It looks very luxuriousness and has a bit of the Arabian nights about it. My only criticism is that it is aimed at families, hence the yummy mummy connection. Personally I think it would make a very reasonably priced romantic get away for a young professional couple.

The other good thing about this is that it is a good diversification project for farmers, if you look on the website you will find that the whole concept can be franchised out to a farmer. There are the usual key concepts to each site but from a farmers point of view well organised and a strong well behaved target market.

Quite an interesting concept and quite an interesting holiday.

Humanistic design touches

I have been thinking some more about noises that things make which perhaps could have been designed in or out but somehow survived into the final product.

My MP3 player says"bye" but not"hello", it could have said "powering down" or just switched itself off. I wonder if bye is translated in foreign versions.

I used to own a motherboard which spoke on start up, until it entered into a suicide pack with my graphics card.

On start up it used to say,

"Power on self test complete, Computer now booting from operating system."

I miss that re-assuring voice. Of course you could have chosen different words how about:

"I have spun my drives, as far as I can tell you have a graphics card processor and some memory now lets see if the operating system wants to start today."

"Hardware OK, now cross your fingers, operating roller coaster system about to start"

"Hardware confirmed, now launching missiles"

"Hardware confirmed, Operating system starting. Do you feel lucky?"

"Hardware confirmed, please insert coffee."

"This is your computer talking. Pre flight systems have been checked, If you care to check out the Windows on your left, we will be serving Java shortly."

Sorry went off on a tangent there.

Great Coffee

First up, I would never advertise a product or service I didn't love, so I am not on commission or anything.

I love Coffee and I have to say the best chain coffee bar for quality, price and value by far is AMT Coffee. Ok so they may not have one one every high street and they may only have kiosks not proper coffee shops but if you are lucky to have one near you then you should try it now.

My favourite style is cappuccino and AMT gets it right nearly every time. AMT are one of the only coffee shops to offer a choice of sprinkles for your cappuccino: chocolate, cinnamon or nutmeg. I changed from chocolate to cinnamon sprinkles and have not looked back.

The only snag is that the cappuccino comes to the top of the cup, so when you put the lid on the sprinkles stick to the lid. One of AMT's big point of difference between it and its competitors is that they listen to their customers. For example, they went organic and changed their snacks stock in response to customer feedback.

I thought I would test the customer feedback out. I collected one of their feedback forms and sent it in suggesting that either the cups or the concave lid should be redesigned so that the sprinkles remained on the foam.

I promptly got a letter back with two free drinks tokens and a good, slightly customized letter, hand signed. Ok so I haven't written many letters before to companies but I did write one to First Great Western once, who wrote back and told me I was clearly wrong.

So well done AMT, you obviously do listen to and value your customers.

I will keep you updated as to whether they change the design of the cup or the lid.

Humanistic Design

Humanistic Design is about how we as people relate to things like technology. Our interaction with technology is a whole science about human interfaces and usability.

Humans intuitively know how things should work. We pick up a camera and we know when we press the button not only should the button go click but we should hear the shutter open and closing.

The thing is technology is now so advanced that the camera doesn't need to go click and make a shutter noise. So why does it? Well quite simply if it did not we as humans would feel uncomfortable without quite knowing why. Therefore the camera would become an alien object to us and sub consciously we might buy the camera that does have the noises even if there is an option to turn them on and off.

The other strange thing about human design is what we expect technology to look and sound like. Take a gadget like an MP3 player, generally silver, small with sexy curves is a good thing. The MP3 player I bought a while ago followed this design ethos, it was small sleek with simple buttons.

However, I discovered a humanistic design flaw. The design is essential a tube with the headphone jack at one end and the usb port at the other. The problem came when deciding what the headphone jack would look like, they went for a straight jack rather than an L-shape. After about two months all the twisting has broken the cable and I have had to go and buy some new headphones. I bought an L-shaped jack and although it breaks up the sleek lines it probably wont break so easily.

Take cars as well, we all know that a really great car will have a throaty engine roar. So engine designers make sports cars with throaty roars, whether they need a good roar to have a good engine is a mute point. Humans demand a good throaty roar so they must have it.

Humans are fascinating creatures, we have so many rules, traditions and customs which our mind creates to make life easier. Our interaction with things is just one study of psychology that I have always found fascinating.

Here are two example clips of humanistic design which are pointless but satisfying, prepare to release your inner geek.

Camera shutter

Phone shut