Bad Designs on Campus - Submission
The Magic Desk
Problem description: In the room 2717 of the IOE building, there is a desk for lecturers, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. the desk in IOE 2717.
We have IOE 691 seminar in the room twice a week. One day, we found that the desk was higher than normal, so we wanted to adjust the height back to normal. Three persons scrutinized the desk for about 5 minutes, but still could not find any control unit for height. At last, one person found a control panel with two keys (up and down) hidden under the surface of the desk, which finally proved the desk was controlled by automation rather than magic. The control panel can be positioned under the cover of the desk (Figure 2a) and moved out (Figure 2b). When the panel stays under cover, people standing and sitting cannot see it.
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(a) | (b) |
Figure 2. The control panel, hidden (a) and out (b). | |
Proposed solution: The changed desk height immediately suggests the function of height control, but the desk does not have any cue of the location of the control unit. Moreover, the position of the control unit does not match our expectation. Most of us searched the two legs of the desk for the control unit, because we naturally associated the function of height control to the physical form that determines the height. Therefore, the proposed two solutions are: (1) to stick a “Height Control Under Here” note on the left corner of the desk as a remediation, and (2) to reinstall the control unit on either one of the desk legs as an ecological design.