RE: ADMIN: Re: OT How do I unsubscribe?.. reading directions

[John Cornellier <cornelli -at- stavanger -dot- geoquest -dot- slb -dot- com>]

Chuck Martin wrote, re. the failure to read door labels, and why same 
shouldn't be necessary anyway:

> incompetence in design

Cheapness, actually. There is a very good reason why push-me-doors and 
pull-me-doors look the same, and it's not design incompetence. The banal 
truth is that it's cheaper to manufacture and install one single type of 
door than two. In the same way, your hifi / waffle iron / car has identical 
knobs for quite different functions. Think of it as object-oriented knobs. 
Design once, use many.

Re. pedestrians' failure to push/pull correctly, one shouldn't go around 
blaming everything on the environment. We must interpret the environment 
and act appropriately, regardless of whether or not the environment has won 
any design awards. Let's face it, indifferent design and cost-cutting are 
going to be with us for some time to come. It may even be part of "la 
condition humaine".

Coming to the point, the moral of this immortal thread is:

That the successful outcome of HI/human interaction depends on two things:
a) that the design be reasonably good, and
b) that the users make a resonable effort to inform themselves as to the 
correct procedure.

> "The Inmates are Running the Asylum"
> Alan Cooper

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes
-- Alice Cooper