I really like my residence. Innis is one of the newer buildings, very well maintained and with lots of resources. The people here are all really helpful and I get along with them very well. I especially appreciate being able to eat whatever I want (or am capable of cooking), whenever I want. The suite style is also a nice balance between having a private space in the form of my own room and being in close quarters with a small group of people sharing a common sub-space—there’s a real sense of “home” rather than just some room where I sleep and study during the semester. Architecturally though, I can’t really figure out what whoever designed the building was thinking.
I’ll start with the outside in. The building is symmetrically structured in a U-shape cradling a quad with green space. There are four floors where everything in the building is connected (like most buildings), then three additional floors on the two wings (legs of the “U”) that are mutually inaccessible—“towers” of sorts. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the building isn’t 100% symmetrical (of course, that’s a little too much to ask to begin with), so there are resources located in one side that is not present in the other: on the sixth floor of the south wing is situated the music room and on the sixth floor of the north wing is the exercise room. For instance, if I were to be at the tip of the north wing on the sixth floor and wanting to use the piano, I would need to walk downstairs to the fourth floor, walk across to the other side and walk back upstairs to the sixth floor. In addition, the middle section (the bottom of the “U”) houses the lobby area on the first floor, so that suites in one wing of the first floor have to go out the main doors, cross the lobby and key themselves in the main doors again to get to the other side. Obviously, this seems terribly inefficient. The only thing to which I could possibly attribute this design decision is aesthetics, and even that’s a bit of a stretch as it doesn’t “look better” enough to offset the inconvenience. (In fact, can the desire for aesthetics really ever trump the need for practicality except in maybe the fashion industry?) It could be an interesting design because it is uncommon, but there seems little if anything gained in return: maybe it’s because I’m short, but I can’t really see the top that well anyway—I doubt anyone really cares enough to look—and there’s no great need for a pretty building as it’s a university residence anyway.
Similarly, the arch in the entranceway was a real source of annoyance, although for that I doubt it extended further than our suite. There’s a big concrete arch about two stories high around the main entrance leading from St. George Street into the lobby. From what my fellow engineer suitemates and I could see, it’s not serving any real structural function, and we were confused as to why it is there as it isn’t very pretty since it’s literally just a big hunk of concrete and metal. I guess we wouldn’t really have noticed its existence either way (again, I doubt anyone really does), except that our suite was the one situated directly above the entrance on the second floor. Because the archway is situated behind a slight overhang—reasonable design decision considering the intercom system and the weather conditions in Toronto—it quite noticeably reduced the area of our living room area and I’m pretty sure ours was in fact the smallest in the residence. One of my suitemates was in Engineering Science Year 2, and there wasn’t enough room for her to work on her AER201 project (she was the electromech member, to top it all off), let alone for the rest of us to have a place to sit half the time.
Speaking of the common room, a quick aside: the “coffee tables” in the common room are of a height that make them hard to use in any context. It’s not high enough to use while sitting on the couches or any chair for that matter, but not low enough to use as a lap table or to work on while sitting on the floor—kneeling seems to be the only position close enough (and probably only for people of a certain height range and/or body part ratios) but it’s not terribly comfortable and murderous for your knees. The only real surface we have to eat on is the somewhat narrow kitchen counter and this table, and while the former is at a height closer to the optimal (given the other furniture provided to us in the suite) it’s usually pretty crowded due to its being used for cooking. Needless to say, holding a steaming bowl of noodles on your lap while bending over to try and eat is not very fun.
Adjacent to the common area, or an extension of it, is the kitchen. I don’t believe this is the case for all suites, but I would venture to say the large majority of them share the following problem: the fridge is situated in such a way that it pretty much cuts off access to a) some cupboards up high (not terribly important, they’re small and there’s a decent amount of other ones) and more importantly b) about half the counter space around the sink. The kitchen isn’t that big to begin with, and four or five people could crowd even a normal-sized kitchen. (Especially for me—being short—reaching around things is really awkward.) There are also more cupboards above the stove hood (how do you reach around that?) and elsewhere, which I don’t think anyone except the tallest few could reach.
Similar inconsistencies exist in bedroom/bathroom shapes and the distribution/layout thereof. We just moved into our new summer suite, and my suitemate physically cannot place her bookshelf flush with the wall because the one available corner juts in (maybe it’s plumbing?) and there’s not enough room on the other walls.
In summary, all I can say is: WHY?
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Design Critique Part I: Things around the House
One way I know engineering and praxis have taken over my life is that more and more frequently, I take note of things I encounter in everyday life that are either nifty or inane. I then find myself evaluating the design of and trying to reverse engineer how the product was finalized. What was the intended objective? How was the idea thought of, i.e. what was the gap identified? What kind of technology is involved? What could have been some restrictions or issues that came up during the process? What were key design decisions and upon what criteria was emphasis put? Does that say anything about who the designer might be, e.g. engineer, architect, artist?
For instance, I was at the Korean supermarket the other day and saw training chopsticks—they had little handles on them like scissors and grooves to teach you the right way to hold them. I thought that was pretty cool and definitely useful, since it’s hard to teach a small child how to hold chopsticks and there are a lot of people who do some fudging and learn it the wrong way. I can’t make a really detailed critique because I didn’t get to use them—they were in packaging and I wasn’t about to buy a pair just to try them out (they weren’t that cheap!)—but I tried to make the general shape my hand would form and it seemed to be correct. They also looked pretty durable and kid-friendly—the plastic was of a decent thickness and there was a variety of different colour patterns so that kids could pick their favourite colour. All in all, a nice balance of everything, definitely well engineered.
And who doesn’t love bag clips? I didn’t know they existed until this past summer when I was shopping for university (we don’t use them at home). I dare say it’s one of the most useful little pieces of plastic ever invented. Someone realized along the line that it would be far simpler to preserve food by closing the existing packaging back up: it’s hassle-free and completely reusable, as opposed to Ziploc bags which can’t be used over and over again or a container you’d have to wash every time you wanted to put something new in. And it’s cheap—you can get a whole bagful for a dollar or something similarly ridiculous. Not the most difficult thing ever to make, but major kudos to whoever managed to think of the obvious—keeping it simple is often harder to do (ask any EngSci).
As another example, take the new Tropicana juice carton cap. They recently switched from the standard disk-like shape to a hemisphere resembling the outside of an orange. At first glance, it’s a nice little touch—little half-orange, orange juice, get it? But then you try to set it down on the table face-up (so as not to contaminate the lid if the surface you’re putting it on isn’t exactly clean—yay for residence life—so it rolls around and the rim ends up touching the surface anyway. You can’t really get a good grip on it either when you’re trying to screw it on or off, because they made the surface smooth for aesthetic purposes. I also think it probably ended up being more costly to manufacture—they would have had to come up with new custom moulds as opposed to the run-of-the-mill ones you can find virtually everywhere, and changing parts of an established assembly line can’t have been easy. Clearly, looking pretty took precedence over practicality and in this case (I’m inclined to extend this conclusion to most cases but that may just be my bias talking) it was not the way to go.
Sometimes, I don’t have the technical background to be able to fully analyze a given product. I’d love to find out exactly how Swiffer products work—it can’t all be about static cling, and what kind of materials are they anyway (and to what degree are they really disposable, i.e. biodegradable in a few years or dumpster fodder for the next century)? There’s also this neat acoustic amplifier for the iPhone that I bought my friend a couple months ago as a birthday present: it uses a “coiled waveguide ‘horn’”—yay resonance! ... I think?—to amplify the sound by about 10 decibels, and it’s quite pretty to boot. It’s fairly small and light, so no more worries about needing an outlet or carrying around bulky speakers.
Speaking of acoustics, how exactly do they get that great sound at Roy Thomson Hall (the seating layout is quite attractive too), and what are the physics behind what makes venues sound different? And speaking of buildings, what’s with the really bad lecture halls in SF, namely 1101 and 1105? I can’t see in the former unless I’m in the very front row because the incline is so shallow, and there’s always a very... interesting smell in there because there’s virtually no ventilation; the latter only has those foldable tables every two seats (did they think only half of us needed writing surfaces?) and that room is notorious for making everyone really, really sleepy—is it the colour? lighting? temperature? an interesting coincidence of similar profs/lecturers? And the textbooks we use—what makes a great one so useful? The one we used in BME105 was really wordy and you couldn’t really find the information you wanted—there is some doubt as to whether it was there in the first place—whereas it is almost universally acknowledged that Stewart is one of the best calculus textbooks ever, but that can’t be all—both had diagrams, both had tables of contents and indexes, etc. Oh, and don’t get me started about EngSci schedules—
I should stop, there’s a lot more to write and only so much time. One of these days, I’ll have the time to go look all of this stuff up, learn all these extra things and finally appease my curiosity.
(...)
(Maybe.)
(...)
(One can hope...?)
For instance, I was at the Korean supermarket the other day and saw training chopsticks—they had little handles on them like scissors and grooves to teach you the right way to hold them. I thought that was pretty cool and definitely useful, since it’s hard to teach a small child how to hold chopsticks and there are a lot of people who do some fudging and learn it the wrong way. I can’t make a really detailed critique because I didn’t get to use them—they were in packaging and I wasn’t about to buy a pair just to try them out (they weren’t that cheap!)—but I tried to make the general shape my hand would form and it seemed to be correct. They also looked pretty durable and kid-friendly—the plastic was of a decent thickness and there was a variety of different colour patterns so that kids could pick their favourite colour. All in all, a nice balance of everything, definitely well engineered.
And who doesn’t love bag clips? I didn’t know they existed until this past summer when I was shopping for university (we don’t use them at home). I dare say it’s one of the most useful little pieces of plastic ever invented. Someone realized along the line that it would be far simpler to preserve food by closing the existing packaging back up: it’s hassle-free and completely reusable, as opposed to Ziploc bags which can’t be used over and over again or a container you’d have to wash every time you wanted to put something new in. And it’s cheap—you can get a whole bagful for a dollar or something similarly ridiculous. Not the most difficult thing ever to make, but major kudos to whoever managed to think of the obvious—keeping it simple is often harder to do (ask any EngSci).
As another example, take the new Tropicana juice carton cap. They recently switched from the standard disk-like shape to a hemisphere resembling the outside of an orange. At first glance, it’s a nice little touch—little half-orange, orange juice, get it? But then you try to set it down on the table face-up (so as not to contaminate the lid if the surface you’re putting it on isn’t exactly clean—yay for residence life—so it rolls around and the rim ends up touching the surface anyway. You can’t really get a good grip on it either when you’re trying to screw it on or off, because they made the surface smooth for aesthetic purposes. I also think it probably ended up being more costly to manufacture—they would have had to come up with new custom moulds as opposed to the run-of-the-mill ones you can find virtually everywhere, and changing parts of an established assembly line can’t have been easy. Clearly, looking pretty took precedence over practicality and in this case (I’m inclined to extend this conclusion to most cases but that may just be my bias talking) it was not the way to go.
Sometimes, I don’t have the technical background to be able to fully analyze a given product. I’d love to find out exactly how Swiffer products work—it can’t all be about static cling, and what kind of materials are they anyway (and to what degree are they really disposable, i.e. biodegradable in a few years or dumpster fodder for the next century)? There’s also this neat acoustic amplifier for the iPhone that I bought my friend a couple months ago as a birthday present: it uses a “coiled waveguide ‘horn’”—yay resonance! ... I think?—to amplify the sound by about 10 decibels, and it’s quite pretty to boot. It’s fairly small and light, so no more worries about needing an outlet or carrying around bulky speakers.
Speaking of acoustics, how exactly do they get that great sound at Roy Thomson Hall (the seating layout is quite attractive too), and what are the physics behind what makes venues sound different? And speaking of buildings, what’s with the really bad lecture halls in SF, namely 1101 and 1105? I can’t see in the former unless I’m in the very front row because the incline is so shallow, and there’s always a very... interesting smell in there because there’s virtually no ventilation; the latter only has those foldable tables every two seats (did they think only half of us needed writing surfaces?) and that room is notorious for making everyone really, really sleepy—is it the colour? lighting? temperature? an interesting coincidence of similar profs/lecturers? And the textbooks we use—what makes a great one so useful? The one we used in BME105 was really wordy and you couldn’t really find the information you wanted—there is some doubt as to whether it was there in the first place—whereas it is almost universally acknowledged that Stewart is one of the best calculus textbooks ever, but that can’t be all—both had diagrams, both had tables of contents and indexes, etc. Oh, and don’t get me started about EngSci schedules—
I should stop, there’s a lot more to write and only so much time. One of these days, I’ll have the time to go look all of this stuff up, learn all these extra things and finally appease my curiosity.
(...)
(Maybe.)
(...)
(One can hope...?)
Engineering Design According to xkcd
Because I couldn’t resist, here are five selections pertaining to some aspect of engineering design. (As an aside, my friends and I have been wondering why the heck everything sounds so much like our lives—we think they’re getting access to our lives/headspaces somehow, say via hidden cameras around the engineering buildings...)
1) #85: Paths (“It’s true, I think about this all the time.”)
My friends and I discuss efficiency of things we see all the time. This was especially pertinent, at least to myself, so when I saw this I literally laughed out loud. My mind becomes a trip planner when I’m going anywhere; it’s especially bad when walking because there’s so much time and so little to pay attention to that sometimes all I’m doing is iterating my pseudo-algorithm. (Just a personal rant: I hate when there’s something that slows me down like barriers or buildings I can’t cut through. Going to class via King’s College Circle is really annoying because the field is covered in snow during the year—I trudge through it anyway if I’m running late and end up with soaked feet—and then when the snow finally melts, it gets closed off.)
2) #242: The Difference (“How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?”)
This should be fairly obvious: learning through personal experience/observation and confirming/refining through iteration. Rigour! Although I wouldn’t label the second branch as only “scientist”—engineers get overlooked once again. It’s yet another example of what has been repeatedly discussed on this blog.
3) #277: Long Light (“You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think, ‘some engineer was frustrated while designing this.’ It’s a little human connection.”)
This will be pertinent to my design critique post later—sometimes, even though something may seem very poorly engineered, there might have been extenuating circumstances and issues that were physically irresolvable. The stubborn, perfectionist part of my mind, however, will always question if anything is really impossible—perhaps a qualifier is necessary, e.g. “given these circumstances”. But is it really possible to rule out all given possibilities even with certain restrictions? Wouldn’t something be figured out eventually? Perhaps that’s what engineering is all about (and one of the main factors distinguishing it from science): approximating a solution as efficiently as possible (resource-wise, e.g. time, cost, labour) instead of trying to come up with an absolute and perfect one that may be impractical to both design and use.
4) #309: Shopping Teams (“I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.”)
This is pretty much what we did in Praxis II for most of the semester: definitions (the gap!) and decision-making heuristics. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing—xkcd obviously thinks it isn’t—but sometimes our desire for rigour ended up in heated debates over the smallest things and we had to step back and look at the big picture again. (Tangent: I’m currently trying to decide if I should take offense at the term “nerd”...)
5) #552: Correlation (“Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.”)
Again, more about the search for rigour—(to make a semi-transparent effort at tying everything together) perhaps it is at the cost of efficiency. I took a course in high school called Theory of Knowledge (required for all IB Diploma candidates) where we were supposed to examine the methods with which we acquire and analyze information, and pretty much all we ended up doing the entire semester was argue that we couldn’t ever really know anything for sure because there was physically no way to get rid of bias. You can’t deny that it’s true, but it’s not very useful. As an aside, I could turn this into an argument in favour of engineering over science, but you could just flip it over in turn and say engineering is pseudo-science, lacks rigour, etc. Is perfection ever attainable?
1) #85: Paths (“It’s true, I think about this all the time.”)
My friends and I discuss efficiency of things we see all the time. This was especially pertinent, at least to myself, so when I saw this I literally laughed out loud. My mind becomes a trip planner when I’m going anywhere; it’s especially bad when walking because there’s so much time and so little to pay attention to that sometimes all I’m doing is iterating my pseudo-algorithm. (Just a personal rant: I hate when there’s something that slows me down like barriers or buildings I can’t cut through. Going to class via King’s College Circle is really annoying because the field is covered in snow during the year—I trudge through it anyway if I’m running late and end up with soaked feet—and then when the snow finally melts, it gets closed off.)
2) #242: The Difference (“How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?”)
This should be fairly obvious: learning through personal experience/observation and confirming/refining through iteration. Rigour! Although I wouldn’t label the second branch as only “scientist”—engineers get overlooked once again. It’s yet another example of what has been repeatedly discussed on this blog.
3) #277: Long Light (“You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think, ‘some engineer was frustrated while designing this.’ It’s a little human connection.”)
This will be pertinent to my design critique post later—sometimes, even though something may seem very poorly engineered, there might have been extenuating circumstances and issues that were physically irresolvable. The stubborn, perfectionist part of my mind, however, will always question if anything is really impossible—perhaps a qualifier is necessary, e.g. “given these circumstances”. But is it really possible to rule out all given possibilities even with certain restrictions? Wouldn’t something be figured out eventually? Perhaps that’s what engineering is all about (and one of the main factors distinguishing it from science): approximating a solution as efficiently as possible (resource-wise, e.g. time, cost, labour) instead of trying to come up with an absolute and perfect one that may be impractical to both design and use.
4) #309: Shopping Teams (“I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.”)
This is pretty much what we did in Praxis II for most of the semester: definitions (the gap!) and decision-making heuristics. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing—xkcd obviously thinks it isn’t—but sometimes our desire for rigour ended up in heated debates over the smallest things and we had to step back and look at the big picture again. (Tangent: I’m currently trying to decide if I should take offense at the term “nerd”...)
5) #552: Correlation (“Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.”)
Again, more about the search for rigour—(to make a semi-transparent effort at tying everything together) perhaps it is at the cost of efficiency. I took a course in high school called Theory of Knowledge (required for all IB Diploma candidates) where we were supposed to examine the methods with which we acquire and analyze information, and pretty much all we ended up doing the entire semester was argue that we couldn’t ever really know anything for sure because there was physically no way to get rid of bias. You can’t deny that it’s true, but it’s not very useful. As an aside, I could turn this into an argument in favour of engineering over science, but you could just flip it over in turn and say engineering is pseudo-science, lacks rigour, etc. Is perfection ever attainable?
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