I was planning to write a blog on good design. I was thinking about it while driving to a ferry early in the morning. The weather is much worse than normal for the season and passengers are waiting, generally underdressed, in a cold windy drizzle. The ferry pulls in and discharges its passenger, and… Read more »
In an earlier blog I referred to the Lelievlet; the standard boat for Dutch Sea Scouts. It is a clever design that has allowed thousands of kids to get a solid taste of life on the water. The first Lelievlet was built in steel in 1955 and since that time over 1600 steel lelievletten have… Read more »
As noted in a prior blog, due to Anne’s disability I became immersed in wheelchair design. This blog is sort of a weird update and explains how design and user experience is a never ending interaction. It touches on subtleties that are extremely difficult to predict as far as design and user effectiveness is… Read more »
Jim Dolan and I had a discussion about a bilge pump repair that went awry and almost simultaneously we expressed frustration about the bizarre variety of bilge pump control installations in boats. We commiserated that in sinking investigations it was always a puzzle to actually figure out how the bilge pumps were configured and especially… Read more »
As usual the Martin & Ottaway Christmas present is late. But maybe I should call it a New Year’s present anyway. This year it is a story. I wrote it late in the last century. It has sort of been published in various places, one of which was a website that I can no longer… Read more »
Standard wheelchairs have not changed in decades. It is a chair with wheels and has foot pads to support a person’s feet and to keep them from dragging on the ground. The foot pads are actually quite complicated, because they need to flip away when the person is being seated or stands up and they… Read more »
I am almost certain that I learned more from popular culture than the classics (whatever the classics may be). For example, the TV series M*A*S*H provided me with two philosophical bits that I still recycle on a regular basis. The first warns me to never drink when I need a drink, and the other restricts… Read more »
Life is complicated, and designing to deal with life’s complications is difficult. Unfortunately bad design unnecessarily punishes humanity by increasing inefficiencies and frustrations. Design mistakes get made, and sometimes the mistakes cannot be easily corrected. However, it is difficult to imagine anything more destructive to humanity than bad design that affects many people that can… Read more »
Accident analysis is a strange and complex task. Often blame is considered to be the motivator for an accident analysis, but the most interesting and useful purpose of an accident analysis is to tease the universally useful gems out of the huge pile of information that tends to get generated during an accident analysis. I… Read more »
The weak English translation of the MIT Costa Concordia report made me wonder about the use of English as a more universal communication system. While driving to a project, I was listening to National Public Radio, and there was a bit about Voice of America broadcasts. I never realized that Voice of America programs cannot… Read more »
A while ago Wayne Thomas forwarded the “Costa Concordia Report on the Safety Technical Investigation” to everybody in the office and only just now did I have a chance to read it. While the report is not dated or specifically identified as “final” it appears this is an English language version of the last word… Read more »
A disaster like the Costa Concordia opens a wide variety of investigations and undoubtedly many people are very busy in analyzing what caused the vessel to strike the reef and to capsize, but striking reefs and capsizing actually is nothing new and, on a technical level, actually is pretty well understood. What is much more… Read more »
Our first blog on “Women and Children First” elicited a fair amount of comment on various discussion sites. A major part of the discussion centered on the Birkenhead disaster. The Birkenhead disaster is considered to be the first application, or even the invention, of the “Women and Children First” concept. Wikipedia provides a fair amount… Read more »
Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson of Uppsala University recently performed an interesting analysis of survival rates in a large number of major ship disasters ranging over a period of over 150 years. They were interested in determining whether the old adage “Woman and Children First” actually occurred in such disasters. While many of their conclusions… Read more »