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Recent Entries

Buzzkill
by Tim McCoy
I’ve been struggling for days to put into words my reaction to the launch of Google Buzz. But the phrase I can’t get out of my head is “HOW could they screw up THIS MUCH?” Well here’s how: Google took Gmail, one of the most widely used web services on... (Continue)
Alternate dimensions
by Daniel Kuo
If you’re a typical designer working in the software world, the majority of products you’ll create will have strictly two dimensional interfaces — length & width only, pixels on the screen. As interfaces have evolved over the years many have gained a very simple kind of "depth": lighting effects, drop... (Continue)
An Insurgency of Quality
by Alan Cooper
Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very... (Continue)

The secret life of elevators

by Daniel Kuo on November 3, 2008

elevator.jpg

Several months back, the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about elevators that explored multiple issues--engineering, architecture, ethnography, economics--and shed light onto the "why" of the elevator design problem we featured in a recent episode of The Drawing Board.

In elevatoring, as in life, the essential variables are time and space. A well-elevatored building gets you up and down quickly, without giving up too much square footage to elevator banks. Especially with super-tall towers, the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible.

As designers we can be dismissive about the why behind the problems we encounter; it's often enough for us that an interaction feels patently hostile. At best we file it under "implementation model" and move on; at worst we assume those design decisions don't have any rationale behind them and neglect to consider it further.

It's easy to become jaded after seeing so many examples of poorly-made software, and while it's possible to come up with a decent solution without digging any deeper, it's critical we understand the why if we really want to marshal the potential of technology to serve human needs. Also, besides informing our work, exploring the whys often reveals fascinating stories that give us insight into the underlying processes, and help us sympathize with the people that created them.

Filed under: Design & engineering

Daniel Kuo

Since joining Cooper in 2005, Daniel has lead visual interface design and branding efforts for products including medical devices, browser-based rich internet applications, enterprise software, and consumer products.


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