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Apple's New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw -- and It Hurts (bloomberg.com)
Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg: The centerpiece of Apple's new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company's famed design-obsessed aesthetic. There's been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass. Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed "pods," also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That's resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents. Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said.
So... people don't pay attention to their surroundings and somehow it's the building's fault?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
As always with Apple it's form over function.
Design over safety or function. Yep, that would be Apple.
Where's that lady with the big sledge hammer when you need her?
The conjunction of this with the FDA Concussion Blood-test story is too delicious!
Someplace else I had read Apple had planned to place graphics on all the windows to prevent this sort of thing, which has now been moved to a "higher priority". How they could open before that was done, is beyond me...
Just further evidence that the physical world is more and more becoming like software, where you always want to avoid being in the early beta if possible.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Classic Apple. Never let users or usability stand in the way of elegant design.
People may be walking into glass, which indeed seems problematic, but that is only a symptom of the real flaw in Apple's approach.
And that critical design flaw is open plan seating. And Apple employees know it, and hate it.
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
Collaboration and productivity are not improved in the slightest by this. They are, in fact, degraded:
http://www.bbc.com/capital/sto...
The only thing that is increased, then, aside from tempers, are the number of beans the bean counters get to count. It is, after all, cheaper to pack sardines into a can than it is to individually wrap them.
Check your premises.
We're just going to have to have our phones tell us when we're about to walk into something. There's no other way to know.
There is a joke here about Windows, but I can't seem to see it.
A building that punishes people for working for an amoral megacorp is exactly what Apple employees deserve.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Remove the employees.
Some settling may occur during posting.
You do it for A, A does it for B, and B does it for you, allowing you all perfect deniability, "I didn't do this!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Until OSHA comes into play.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
no one saw that coming...
I'll show myself out now...
"Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said."
Sure, you could make it FUNCTIONAL, but that's not what it's there for. It's there to look pretty, set standards, and impress folks for whom functionality is not a concern.
Design over functionality. *checks apple product line for the last decade* Yup. Pretty consistent.
Note, there is a thing called 'Good Design' that actually marries looks and functionality, but apple hasn't had a horse in that race for a good long time.
No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.
I miss classic Apple.
Article is useless without pictures of the issue. Article only contains pictures of the outside of the building. I will assume they are just trolling.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The first time I saw this issue was when I was on a field trip in the 1970s. One of my classmates had one of the new handheld Mattel Football games and was playing it as we walked around.
We were in one of those museums that has glass walls dividing the major rooms, and he smacked into one at full waking pace. He ended up with a nasty bloody nose. He might even have broken his nose; I can't remember. However, one thing I have always remembered since then is to look up frequently if I'm walking around with some kind of device.
But seriously, this reminds me (entirely from memory as I don't have it in front of me) of Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, where he describes the first boxy modern skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall windows. Tenants would put lamps or trash cans, bookcases, anything in front of the windows to create a demarcation between the office and empty air 20+ floors up. The architects would come by and patiently remove the obstacles and chide the tenants for spoiling the look.
The point, as I recall, being, what looks cool and progressive doesn't necessarily wear well in daily use. Buildings should first be designed to be usable for their intended purpose. If you can also make them cool looking, that's a bonus.
But this is Apple, so looking cool and innovative probably *is* the intended purpose. With usability a bit further down the list.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm wondering if they hired new architectural integrity enforcers to prevent post-its and other ad-hoc field deviations from the new design or whether they just re-tasked existing HR shills for this job.
They went with a one-button mouse to force programmers to write software which could be controlled by a single mouse button. Before then, programmers would write whatever they wanted and expected users to learn all the esoteric intricacies of how their software operated. In that respect, the one-button mouse succeeded marvelously in creating a unified UI experience, and vastly reducing the amount of learning required of users to use a computer.
Apple's mistake with the one-button mouse was sticking to a single button long after their original success had ingrained certain UI functionality into that single button. They could've added a second or even third button later on (as Windows did) without diminishing the benefit to UI simplicity that the single-button mouse had fostered. But by then they were well down their Form uber alles path, and stuck with the one-button mouse.
Thank you. I've said for a long time now that Apple's design philosophy is mostly driven by form over function. This makes their design pretty terrible functionally, which is diametrically opposed to the popular opinion that their design is great. Sure, aesthetically it is, but the functionality really suffers. The list of their design mistakes due to this wrong-headed design philosophy is long. Just off the top of my head:
- Flat square keys on keyboards, which makes it impossible for your fingers to center on the keys.
- Glossy screens which cause all kinds of glare problems.
- Sharp edges on laptop cases which dig and cut into hands and wrists.
- Aluminum cases on laptops, which dent easily.
- Polished metal cases on phones, which scratch incredibly easily.
- The removal of 3.5mm, 1/8th inch headphone jacks on phones.
- The removal of Ethernet ports on laptops.
All those are ridiculous functional design blunders that were made mostly for the aesthetics of their devices. In other words, form over function.