Reading Response 9: One Unqualified Design

The last chapter works as a summary to the whole book, reminding us to highlight the affinity between human beings and technology and the human-tech designs should be tailored to facilitate our daily life. As a saying goes, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. In order to design a popular product, precise knowledge of human nature (likes and dislikes, psychological habits, expectations, etc.) is required, as well as the professional, technical skills to design it. It needs a lot of effort to fully implement this design principle, while new items should manage to meet this criteria, problems should be identified from old, existing ones to make improvements.

I just instance an example occurred to myself, and it is a small gadget, a kettle in my house, which lacks comprehensive consideration as to the security issue.

 This is the kettle, having no water in it and no power to boil water.



When the kettle is filled with water and pressed the button to start working, a blue light is automatically turned on, giving the signal of being careful to me, the hot water. Actually, this is a nice design. But one thing captures my attention, what will happen if I press the start button while no water in it? Terribly, the light is still on and the kettle seems to continue working, which may cause a fire when someone does this carelessly.

One thing even worse happened to this kettle. Once I forgot to close its lid when boiling water. At that time, I was sitting at the table, backwards the kettle, unnoticed of my careless. And I was wondering why it is still not done after quite a long time. To my great surprise, when I turned my head and found the water up and down in it, but never reached the boiling point. Damn! This gadget wasted my time, the electricity resource. This item should be designed to refuse obeying people's orders if there is no water in it or the lid is still open. In a word, it must have certain safeguards to prevent potential dangers.