Examples of design as a fail-safe measure

Posted on Jul 30, 2009 in Design | 8 comments

Who would have thought a prohibition on brown M&Ms could be a safety measure?

In the opening of this weekend’s episode of This American Life, host ira Glass discussed a line from rock group Van Halen’s concert rider. The line, requiring that a bowl of M&Ms be available backstage with all the brown candies removed, is infamous for typifying rock stars’ demanding needs. Ira’s talk with another, less flamboyant rock star reveals that the color-specific M&M requirement is less about Van Halen’s finicky taste in candy and more about safety. In short, it’s a great example of design moving beyond form and becoming functional. In this case, it ensures the venue’s management has read and followed the band’s stringent requirements for its extensive gear, lighting, and speakers for their show. (Listen to the opening sequence for the rest of the story.)

It’s the design of the rider that strikes me as most ingenious. By working in a personal request deep among the paragraphs of concert specifications, the band would know instantly whether the rigorous safety requirements  in the rider had been paid attention to. Brown M&Ms in the bowl = unread rider; a candy-coated canary in the coalmine. Simple, elegant, and effective. Now that’s good design. If you like, you can read the whole rider.

When I heard this story, I was reminded of other instances of design as fail-safe measures. They may not mean the difference between an awesome concert and a collapsed stage with crushed band members, but they illustrate how good design is more than just visually-appealing posters or an efficient computer interface.

• Read all the instructions first – Like the concert rider, it pays to follow directions. In elementary school I remember a test where the class was given a sheet of 25 simple instructions, like “stand up, then sit down,” “say your name out loud,” “clap once,” simple math problems, etc. The first instruction was “read entire test first.” The last instruction? “Ignore all instructions and just sit quietly.” Those who followed the directions and read the test first sat, amused, as their too-eager classmates plowed through each instruction. (No word on which camp I was in…)
• Go where you’re supposed to, when you’re supposed to – The design of a “watchman’s clock” is ingenious. Developed in the late 1800s, this system of dispersed keys and a “clock” into which they fit ensured watchmen made their appointed rounds. “Necessity is the mother of invention” and lazy watchmen necessitated this tool. Rather than try to guilt or cajole workers to patrol the building or grounds they were paid to watch, this system provided physical proof the watchmen had been where they were supposed to—and when. They’re still for sale today, though I imagine a computerized GPS-based system will replace them sometime.
• Car thieves can’t turn corners – Ever tried to move a relatively modern car without the key? I have… at a party where parking’s tight and I just wanted to move the car a few feet. With older cars it’s no problem. Newer cars, though, are designed so that the steering wheel locks if it’s turned without the key. It was explained to me that that was a anti-theft measure. If the car is stolen by hotwiring, the thieves better be driving the thing straight up a ramp into a waiting semi trailer, KITT-style, because it’s not turning any corners.
• Please read our newsletter… we’ll pay you! – School Employees Credit Union of Washington employs a crafty trick to ensure their customers read their monthly bulletin: free money. Embedded within its pages are a handful of account numbers set apart from the text with double parentheses: ((xxxxxx)). If you find your number, call to inform them and you get $100 in your account. It’s very effective. As I scoured it each month looking for my account, I couldn’t help but glean something from most of the brief articles. This approach is similar to the watchman’s clock, but uses a “carrot”—free cash—rather than a “stick”—getting fired for not completing your rounds.
  (Now that I get e-mailed notices of the newsletter rather than receive it in the mail, I open the PDF and search for my account number. This approach side-steps the design’s intent, of course, but it’s more efficient for me. It will be interesting to see whether SECUWA modifies their newsletter to combat this: adding random numbers of spaces between digits in the account number, for instance. Then I’d write a regular expression to strip the whitespace as I searched. Then we’d be locked in a small-scale arms race.)

These are just a few examples that sprang to mind, but there are undoubtedly others. Please share your examples in the comments so this post can grow. Include a description of the design feature and what behavior it’s intended to prevent or encourage.

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