Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Bad designs Returns

In the city where I was raised, most of houses don’t have gas heating boilers. As a consequence people must have electrical showers. This type of shower has a switch where one can set the maximum temperature by sliding it across 3 modes: “turn-off” (without heating the water), “Summer” or “Winter”. In the “Summer” mode the water temperature is barely warm while in the “Winter” mode the water is quite hot. “Summer” and “Winter” are meant to be set during its respective season. It sounds obvious, but for some strange reason when I was a kid I used to think that “Summer” would mean “hot” and Winter would mean “cold”.

Recently, while using the remote control of my air conditioner, the same question came up to my mind and puzzled me again. On such a control, to set the air conditioner to the heating mode, the “sun” symbol must be shown in the display (does this mean “summer”?). On the other hand, to set it to cold air the “snow” symbol must be chosen.

In this example, we have the same metaphor used for 2 opposite things. One can really get confused with that! Yesterday, the weather was quite hot and a friend of mine asked to turn on the air conditioner. After several minutes without feeling the fresh air I looked at the remote control and the sun was shining at the display. He obviously had the same doubts as me.

Fortunately, new models of these showers have a switch with the options “Hot” and “Warm”, which make things easier.

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