[IP] You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where? (NY Times Op-Ed: 12 March 2004)
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Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:57:16 -0500 (EST)
From: GLIGOR1@xxxxxxx
Subject: You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where? (NY Times Op-Ed: 12 March 2004)
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March 12, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where?
By HARVEY MOLOTCH
f
or anyone who has flown recently, chances are that the airport security
checkpoint ? that travel sppot where anxious human beings meet guards and
their equipment ? didnn't provide a very nice experience. Surely there has
to be a better way for the paraphernalia on one's person (or in one's
person: think pacemaker) to mesh with instruments and instructions that are
supposed to ward off trouble. While the ordinary goods of daily life
receive exacting attention from industrial designers, ergonomic experts and
human behavior analysts, airport security artifacts are the products of
casual indifference. The stuff is terrible.
Before your next flight, take a closer look (not close enough to stir
suspicions, just closer). The trays where you put your laptop or packages
are off-the-shelf products never meant for airport use. They are for busing
dishes in restaurants. The plastic bowls for your coins and cellphone were
meant for nail salons and institutions serving people not to be trusted
with ceramic (the one I turned over at Kennedy Airport was Rubbermaid). The
"recovery" tables where travelers retrieve their luggage on the other side
of the X-ray scanners are the fold-ups one finds in church recreation halls.
Adapting goods for new purposes can be ingenious, but not in this case.
Coins tumble to the floor; people slow down the line as they struggle to
lift their suitcases onto the conveyor belt and into the scanners.
Strollers get tangled in equipment, worried people lunge for film they fear
will be radiated. Some travelers simply do not get any instructions because
they do not speak English. Folks tending to be a little mixed up in
ordinary life are also prone to mix up their duty-free receipts with the
boarding pass. Some travelers come undone. The mishaps distract the guards,
forcing them to interrupt their work and call for reinforcements.
None of this is good for passengers, for airlines or for security. There
are alternatives, some of which are not rocket science. The change bowls
need some kind of funnel shape to help coins spill back into a cupped hand.
The trays should have rubber linings to protect electronic goods against
vibration and to prevent gifts from breaking. The platforms to the conveyor
belts should slant down so that travelers don't have to lift their luggage
as high. More ambitiously, the whole operation needs systematic analysis ?
just like one that an industrial designer would conduct for a car model or
can opener. The result could be a radically different configuration of
apparatus, queues and sensibilities.
The personnel also need a rethinking. The government employees now on duty
have better training and demeanors than the hapless private contract
workers they replaced, but they are still set up to control. They engage in
a regime of instruction, prohibition and surveillance. Travelers are
expected to toe the line: lift that laptop, take off those shoes and make
no wrong jokes. The security personnel are not there as helpers. So old
people struggle by themselves to get their luggage up, parents herd unruly
toddlers through the metal detectors and novice flyers worry about which of
their things go where and just when and how they will be retrieved.
Having employees help people with their luggage could have security
advantages. The security workers could see the stuff and feel the goods â??
their heft, sounds and textures. They could observe the faces of the owners
and how those faces respond to offers for help. The presence of helpers
would also reassure and increase the confidence of those who fumble,
causing them to fumble less. And, hardly a small matter, people have a
better time.
As security concerns inject more checkpoints into our lives, the same
questions of design arise. Will there be detailed caring or only command
and control? As accomplished designers know, a good appliance blends
machine and person for both functionality and pleasure. Cumulatively, all
the little machine-human interactions build into psychological and social
states of place and culture. The conditions at airport security checkpoints
show that despite having many millions of dollars to invest, the custodians
have not come up with a decent design.
Given the usual worries of getting to the airport, weather delays and (now)
the threat of mayhem in the skies, flying is anxiety-ridden enough. Isn't
it time for someone in charge to go out there and redo things?
Harvey Molotch, a professor of metropolitan studies and sociology at New
York University, is the author of "Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters,
Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are."
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>Copyright 2004
<http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company
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