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Previous: Cleaning fluid bottle designs | Main | Next: Restaurant sign
October 22, 2003 12:44 AM
Broken: Train indicator
Alexander Colville writes from Woking, England:
This is a picture of the air conditioning status indicator onboard a British train - taken while in motion, so excuse the fuzziness.I can just about cope with the light labelled with a single exclamation mark, but the second, with two, has got to make you start to worry...
I think they just ran out of room on the display - otherwise we would have seen the ultimate in air-conditioning status: "!!!!!!"
Well, although, it may seem like "warning!" and "WARNING!!", it could simply be a signal to the tech in charge of the unit. ! flashing means xxxx, !! flashing means yyyy, alternating means zzzzz.
Granted, using numbers would make a heck of a lot more sense!!
OR.... one may be a "warning" and one may be a "service needed" indicator. That's not uncommon. So, one may mean, "Hey, you'd better check this thing" and the other means a "fatal failure".
Would be so unusual if a single indicator could have three different colors and therefore three different meanings and no text below? No... so, why is OK, !, and !! so unusual?
"Would be so unusual if a single indicator could have three different colors and therefore three different meanings and no text below? No... so, why is OK, !, and !! so unusual? "
well, because those three colours would most likely be red, amber, and green, which are (at least slightly) more obvious in meaning than OK, !, and !!
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Previous: Cleaning fluid bottle designs | Main | Next: Restaurant sign
Why is this necessarily "broken"? The first question to ask is, who is the user of this display? If it's you or I, it is indeed mysterious as to what "!" and "!!" mean. However if it's a trained conductor, those two extra lights can convey up to 4 different conditions in the A/C system.
I submit that if we don't know the intended user and don't know the context of use, we really don't have a basis for determining if it's a broken design. On the other hand, it is an excellent item to conjecture about during a train ride!
Posted by: Marc Chrusch at October 31, 2003 12:39 PM