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People and machines can accomplish wonders when they understand each other—and create cataclysms when they don’t by Clay Chandler, Executive Editor, Asia at Fortune Magazine.
The partial meltdown of a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 is typically explained as the product of mechanical malfunction and human error. The precipitating cause of the catastrophe, the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, was the malfunction of a pipe meant to pump water into one of the plant’s two reactors to keep it from overheating. Plant operators inadvertently made things worse by shutting off a backup system.
But Cliff Kuang, in a fascinating new book, argues that Three Mile Island is better understood as a design failure. The reactor, he notes, would have saved itself had it been left alone. Instead, a simple pump failure became a nuclear nightmare because “catastrophically bad control room design” made it impossible for the men operating the plant to understand what had gone wrong. “The plant and the men were talking past each other,” Kuang writes. “The plant hadn’t been designed to anticipate the imaginations of men; the men couldn’t imagine the workings of a machine.”
Humans and machines talking past each other is the central preoccupation of 2019’s two most important design books. One is Kuang’s, written with designer Robert Fabricant and titled User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. The other is How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us, by design and tech guru John Maeda...
What Kind of Designer Are You?
Tech and design guru John Maeda taxonomizes
designers into three categories. Business leaders may find that their
problem-solving styles overlap with one or more of the descriptions.
“Classical" designers create physical objects or products for a specific group of people, usually with an end-goal of a single tangible product in mind. This is the approach taught in traditional design schools.
“Commercial” designers seek insights into how customers interact with products and services, and innovate based on that knowledge. The idea of “design thinking” is associated with this category.
“Computational” designers use programming skills and data to attempt to quickly satisfy users. These practitioners often deploy imperfect or incremental designs, and modify them after seeing how they perform.
Read more... “Classical" designers create physical objects or products for a specific group of people, usually with an end-goal of a single tangible product in mind. This is the approach taught in traditional design schools.
“Commercial” designers seek insights into how customers interact with products and services, and innovate based on that knowledge. The idea of “design thinking” is associated with this category.
“Computational” designers use programming skills and data to attempt to quickly satisfy users. These practitioners often deploy imperfect or incremental designs, and modify them after seeing how they perform.
Recommended Reading
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| User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play |
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| How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us |
Source: Fortune
