Seating in public places and transport

Does anyone think that seating in public environments could be designed better. I was thinking that perhaps there are a few issues with some of the common trends in this area. I have been travelling a lot recently, waiting in public spaces like airports and stations and using a lot of busses and trains and so on. The thing I have been noticing is that people often do not sit optimally for the best health of the crowd, that is to say, people often sit to to isolate them selves using a certain method, i.e. not sitting next to people if possible. There are of course other factors that are seen in some of the mentioned areas, like the availability of power, the fact that groups often move together, and the fact that some of the noted environments involve distinct changes in use statistics. 

Sooo. I thought about a few of these things and though a way to make busses or train a little nicer would be to make less wall oriented seating and more floating seating that would still let people walk around and would let people either be close to or less close to people around them depending on their acquaintance with each other and without taking up too much extra space. 

Also, I thought a little bit about steps to socially engineer people sitting in airport gates and other such places to make sure they would use the available chairs optimally, or at least in the sense that clusters and isolated individuals could exit without wasting seats or making either group less happy. 

I will try to put some sketchup models together to show what I am thinking about. Any other ideas?

Brain Damage

Earlier today I had a grade one concussion a few minutes after hitting my head on the floor during a kung fu drill. As the concussion set in I realised I did not know where I was or what I was doing and a few other things like that. Luckily the person I was doing drills with was a neurologist and he quickly analysed the situation and started to explain what had happened. As the evening went on I think I remembered most things that happened before hand but I do not really remember some of the time from initially realising i was concussed and then sitting down and talking with this guy about it. I am not sure if that is a serious problem though. 

So my parents are supposed to wake me up 4 times to check if I have not fallen into a comma and I am not supposed to not do anything to hurt my brain. We will see. If I am not alive tomorrow I am sorry to all of you who I owe money and the people who's stuffed creatures are not yet in the mail. 

In other news, there were some really interesting articles on China in a Boing Boing post I read today. Check out the links in this post. 

If strengths and weaknesses are the same thing

I think in some problems the strengths and the weaknesses end up being the same issue. For instances in Co-ops, where a main strength is the localised control over activity and intentions and similarly a main failing point is the exact same issue. This is an interesting prospect to me as it seems to suggest that good solutions only come through a wicked problems analysis. Or at least an IBIS one in which there are tightly quantised strengths and weaknesses to, essentially calculate net value of features in a system. 

So I am not sure if this is relevant or interesting to anyone but I think it is something worth considering. I would perhaps even say that this is a good measure for how solvable a problem is. If solutions generally include features as strengths and weaknesses then great solutions are probably hard to find. (I have no data supporting this it just seems to be an interesting possibility) I think this is a little relevant with the idea of how to ask an answerable question. 

Artificial Limitations in PlanHQ

Recently PlanHQ have done a bunch of updates to their service which are making it a lot more usable. I think they are still missing the money in some respects and they persist in providing an interface which seems to remove all familiarity and context driven knowlege from the process of business decision making.  Workflow should not be ignored, yet the updates are exciting. Now it works in most browsers quite acceptably.

One aspect of their product which they are yet to change is the minimisation model. Currently the do not offer a free product, though next week they are opening one aspect of the product to free accounts, which in its self is not a bad thing but I think most costumers they could get are turned away buy the fact they have to pay even on the lowest level. My real gripe with this model is that it often inspires companies to create really lame lowest level products. In the case of PlanHQ it is not too different, their lowest level model includes a number of serious hindrances that are completely artificial to the system. There is no complexity involved just convenience on the customers part, for updating to the higher services. The limitation in this software are things like the number of users, which is 3, and the number of (presumably) concurrent goals, which is 10. There are a few other more legitimate limitations like higher security and customisation, but really, for $9 a month, you can only have 3 users. I think that is really lame. 

So in protest, perhaps, I have been using the software on a trial plan for 30 days. On Monday I think I am going to start paying for it but I am still really annoyed that I would have to pay $49 just to get more than a few users. 

Ok so I hate artificial limitations, especially ones you have to pay for. But all this ranted, I think that the limitations in something like twitter really make the product. Without such a thing it would be quite a different, and presumably less desirable service. 

Just is my last utterances I think PlanHQ should set up a contractor account system. That could be really nice, almost like a CMS service. Perhaps this is a distorted dream that would never work as well as Sugar or Highrise with companion services. 

Hearing but not living advice

I think it is easy to give great advice that people listen to and believe and agree with. However I think it is really rare that they actually manage to implement it. I think this is not because people are not good at implementation I really think it is more because a lot of advice is not designed well for that purpose. Perhaps there is also a proponent that is the kind of person being advised, some people are very willing to document and enable advice as it comes along. However, I think in general people sort of Grok the advice they are given, consciously make some kind of ruling over it. Though I would argue the outcome of that ruling is irrelevant, and then they move on. I guess I think it is more like forgetting than anything else, but in the context of implementing, as opposed to just considering, I think it could be related to a lack of emotive power, of a given piece of advice. 

So I think it is much easier to offer a advice that gives a good potential or ideal solution and much harder to offer advice that will actually get implemented. Maybe this is only the case because a lot of the advice giving I have data on is unpaid design consulting or similar. Perhaps where there is more of a sale there is a greater propensity to follow a given point of suggestion. 

Bottom Up Business

So this is nothing new but I have been thinking about a frame of thought providing justification for bottom up institutions. The idea originally came from the fact that I wanted to do design management and realised that by doing the associated tasks I was not actually doing creative design but simply helping the designers I managed do more creative design. Of course this may happen though creative insight on behalf of the manager but the real point is that a manager's job is really just to help improve the potential of the designer. I think this generalises to other fields and to most systems in which there is hierarchy. 

Ok so that was probably not at all new, but I do think it is interesting that the higher paid workers really just help the lower paid workers perform in an effective manner.  I think this probably applies all the way up the hierarchy. I think if people thought about it in this way it might make some business stuff run a little more smoothly. And I think it would be really effective if governments acted in this fashion more.