If Google Made Pay Phones & Why Physicists Won’t Paint

[riky]

If Google Made Pay Phones & Why Physicists Won't Paint
      

During a five-minute video clip on "hostile design," noted science fiction writer and design critic Bruce Sterling (author of Britannica's extensive history of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login) offers up two wonderful stories:  one, a hilarious George Carlin-like take on what a pay phone designed by Google would be like and the other on why physicists in the tunnels of CERN, lost in that chasm between the "two cultures" of science and art, would rather die than paint.  As Bruce says about the latter,

<font color=#990000>"I went down once into the accelerator in CERN in Geneva, and when we were driving around the accelerator ring in an electric golf cart and the guy was explaining that they are out, you know, pursuing the pi meson or whatever, he said, you know quite often we have accidents down here because people are driving the 27km line of this tube and they just zone out and crash into the wall.

So I said why don't you just put in some murals to break the visual monotony, and he just starred like I had come from Mars, and I said, look, it's lit 24 hours, right?  Why don't you put in some house plants. I mean just kind of humanize the interface a little bit.  I mean this is so punishingly monotonous that you are actually harming people.

The guy's brain couldn't go there.  It's a physics instrument, you can't paint it!"</font>




         

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