1 min to read

Are Your Lights On?

Notes from the book by Donald C. Gause

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Here are some notes from Are Your Lights On?

Being less experienced with printing, came up with a startling and effective new approach

You don’t want to be the guy with the most experience to have the best solution. Sometimes being outside of the fray is what lets you come up with a unique solution.

We never get rid of problems. Problems, solutions, and new problems weave an endless chain. The best we can hope for is that the problems we substitute are less troublesome than the ones we “solve.”

I can solve A but it’s attached to B. Like in medicine, everything has side effects.

Designers, like landlords, seldom if ever experience the consequences of their actions. In consequence, designers continually produce misfits. A misfit is a solution that produces a mismatch with the human beings who have to live with the solution

Whose problem is it?

Don’t try to make it your problem. It’s not ‘I have a problem’. Make it OUR problem. WE have a problem.

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Are your lights on?

There are multiple ways to warn people on the hightway to turn their lights on without blinding the people coming from the opposite way. You could take the detailed approach, trying to cover all the cases:

  1. IF IT IS DAYLIGHT, AND IF YOUR LIGHTS ARE ON, TURN OFF YOUR LIGHTS;
  2. IF IT IS DARK, AND IF YOUR LIGHTS ARE OFF, TURN YOUR LIGHTS ON;
  3. IF IT IS DAYLIGHT, AND IF YOUR LIGHTS ARE OFF, LEAVE YOUR LIGHTS OFF;
  4. IF IT IS DARK, AND IF YOUR LIGHTS ARE ON, LEAVE YOUR LIGHTS ON.

Or you could trust your users to have some intelligence

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Fish in water

NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE. IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS,   REALLY WANT THEIR PROBLEMS SOLVED.

You’re always the last to see the issue.

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