Design of Everyday Things [120]
The rule I wish to invoke is that everyday language and perception are mostly conceptually simple. They are done without backtracking, without conscious involvement or even awareness. Both language and perception have situations that violate these assumptions, but they are relatively infrequent. When they occur, they require conscious involvement. And they provide patterns that are difficult to perceive or understand. In fact, a majority of these structures are created deliberately, as illusions, or puzzles, or brainteasers, or as the counterexamples and problems that linguists spend so many hours inventing and discussing.
10 There is a whole field devoted to the design and analysis of highway systems. These particular points are discussed in chapters by Alexander & Lunenfeld (1984) and by Kinner (1984).My own experience is that while signs on the major national motorways may be well done, with considerable thought and planning, signs on the smaller roads are not. The signs on the local roads require more local knowledge, which visitors usually lack. In England, when I am offered a choice between Buxton and Whittlesford while I am trying to get to Oxford, what do I do? Or suppose I am home in San Diego trying to get to Mission Bay, when I am offered a choice between El Centro and Los Angeles, neither of which I wish to visit. When making long journeys on the secondary roads of England, I learned to go around each roundabout two or three times, each time eliminating a different exit until I finally could select what appeared to be the best. In this way I got lost only one in five times instead of every time. Fortunately, the good manners of British motorists made my circling possible, even safe. I have tried the same thing in the United States, but I was risking my life.
11 J. Maclean (1983), Secrets of a superthief (New York: Berkley Books), 108.
12 Although the nuclear power industry has done a good job of analyzing the situation, it has not been so responsive in actually changing anything, especially the design of the control rooms. It’s almost impossible to redo an existing control room, a process that can cost millions of dollars and disrupt the plant for several years. We now know how to build much better control rooms, but there aren’t any new plants being built in the United States. And, of course, management would have to take responsibility and recognize that human error results primarily from deficient design; I see few signs that this message is understood. The new control rooms of other countries’ plants that I read about appear to have the same old misguided, inferior philosophy about how control rooms should be designed. The designs will definitely lead to error (which will be blamed on the operators, who will then be retrained and retrained, or, more likely, simply fired).The aviation industry has been more responsive. But its costs are lower, and new cockpit designs and aircraft are continually being produced.
Other industries seem quite unaware of these problems, even though the documented accident and death rates to workers and innocent bystanders may be higher than for either nuclear power or commercial aviation. Human error, they call it, allowing them to fire the people involved and ignore the misdesign of the plant that led to the problem in the first place. The chemical, petroleum, and shipping industries seem particularly at fault, blaming training or operator incompetence when, in fact, the problems are inherent in the system. For an excellent analysis of these issues, read Charles Perrow’s (1984) book,