Somewhat Off Topic, or not as the case may be given our UI and look
discussions. 

>From RISKS 23.26

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 08:50:20 -0500
From: David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
Subject: An interesting airplane user interface

I found the following anecdote in Edward Tufte's message board:
  http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?
  msg_id=0001Gl&topic_id=1&topic=Ask%20E%2eT%2e

  Alan Kay and User Interfaces

  I attended the course in Boston yesterday, and enjoyed it very much.  Made
  me think about the following story which might spur some discussion or
  comments here. It seems related to the overall theme here.

  In 1985 I attended an OOPSLA (Object oriented programming languages ...)
  conference. Alan Kay (PARC/Smalltalk/ Apple/Macintosh/...) gave a
  presentation. Alan told the following true story:

  He once flew down to Mexico on vacation, to some lonely place on the
  California peninsula for surfing etc. A pilot was supposed to come in a
  week to pick him up at a rural landing strip. Alan got there on time,
  waited, and eventually the plane, an older DC3, came. When Alan entered
  the plane he noticed that almost all the instruments had been unscrewed
  from the panels, pulled out and twisted around in various positions, and
  were basically standing (or waving) on their cable hoses like flowers on
  their stems. He got worried, considered exiting the plane, but decided to
  stay. The pilot, a younger fellow, seemed trustworthy.

  When the plane had reached cruising altitude and speed Alan suddenly "got
  it" wrt. the instruments. As long as everything was operating correctly,
  all the needles on the instruments was pointing in the same direction! It
  was very easy to spot if anything out of the ordinary was going on, and
  what that might be.

  This story has stuck with me as a super example of adapting the technology
  to what we people are good at, as opposed to the other way around which is
  too often the case.

  Enjoy, Harald

With the multitude of gauges in a cockpit this is a brilliant way to quickly
scan the status of the various components of the airplane.  The display of
information is quite important in complex systems and has been discussed in
RISKS before (e.g., RISKS-23.12, the whole "Bubba" debate).


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