Warning: Rant
My husband and I are both left-handed.
There are approximately 708 million left-handers in the world.
Over 9% of people are left-handed.
Apparently these numbers do not meet the threshold for inclusion in product design.
My former Mr. Coffee coffeemaker had ambidextrous functionality. The flap over the water reservoir opened to the back, allowing someone to pour water easily from either side.
My new Mr. Coffee coffeemaker includes a design change. The flap over the water reservoir opens to the left, making it almost impossible for me pour water into it.
I just bought a new electric water kettle. The first time I filled it with water, I guessed at the fill limit because I saw no markings inside.
Then I read the instruction manual that referenced the maximum fill line. What? Turns out, I can only see the fill line markings if I fill the kettle while holding it in my right hand. 🤦♀️
If you are a product designer, you commit design malpractice if you fail to acknowledge the existence of left-handers.
The key point that I think a lot of engineers still don't get is that their job is not about making widgets that get plonked on top of the world. This is about changing the shape of things inside a working system (Planet Earth) to shift how it operates. Those widgets become part of that system - it's like operating on a living human. The engineers of the future mustn't see their job as creating things external to the world. #science#engineering#climate#Earth
Since Twitter’s essentially over, I made this account to continue sharing my content. If you’re interested in the below hashtags, then hopefully you’ll find my posts interesting!
The below picture is the Sunflower Galaxy that I captured a couple months ago.
We've just started installing the aluminium cladding that will protect ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope from the harsh conditions of the Atacama Desert in #Chile.
It's amazing to see this project take shape. And it's hard to convey just how big this is –– the dome is 80 m tall!
An academic colleague, a bio-engineer who builds artificial heart valves, just said to me that he likes this sort of engineering because it’s about repairing and maintaining existing systems (the human body) rather than just building new widgets. It had never occurred to me that a far better attitude to what engineers are for already exists in the engineering world. I think that all engineers working on anything related to climate should also have this attitude. #engineering#sustainability
Do you want to learn about the amazing #engineering behind large optical telescopes? Tom Scott recently visited ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile, and in his latest video he tells us all about it, including a sneak peek at our Extremely Large #Telescope !
Seeing the colossal dome of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope moving for the first time is mind-blowing! 🤯
In this first test engineers used special hydraulic devices to rotate the dome 10 m back and forth at 1 cm/s. Once it's operational it'll move at about 5 km/h with motorised bogies.
Quite impressive, as the skeleton currently weighs ~2500 tons and it'll weigh ~6100 tons when finished!
This image perfectly conveys just how huge the 100-m dish of the Green Bank Telescope is. I had the chance to visit it a few years ago, back when I lived in the US, and the view from the receiver room is stunning. Although I must admit that looking down through the mesh floor was... "an experience" 😵💫 😅
Early in my career I worked for a commercial company that had engineering contracts with the Navy. The level of engineering specifications, design docs, test planning, and testing and retesting was enormous for the projects that I worked on.
Peoples lives were at stake. An the effort was warranted.
When I moved away from government projects into the commercial/consumer world I was shocked at how little, if any, of that effort went into commercial product development.
All of those efforts are used to identify and test boundary conditions, mistaken assumptions, surprising human interactions, and many more things that designers and developers miss initially.
We're starting to hear comments from insiders about design and testing flaws of the OceanGate sub.
Commercial efforts in complex areas like AI, driverless cars, air craft and submersibles are good. But they must be held to the same standard as government efforts, e.g. NASA. Cost control is not an option.
Mirror mirror on the wall... err, sorry: on ESO's Extremely Large Telescope! The first segments of the primary mirror of the ELT now have a shiny layer of protected silver.
Once fully assembled, the primary mirror will be 39 m wide. It will consist of 798 of these hexagonal segments, working together as a single mirror thanks to a complex system of sensors and positioning actuators with nanometric accuracy.
This isn't your typical #unboxing#video! A few days ago the first segments of the huge 39-m mirror of ESO's Very Large #Telescope arrived in #Chile, and our engineers checked that they hadn't suffered any damage.
Each segment was shipped in its own box containing sensors that tracked the temperature, humidity and shocks throughout the entire 10 000 km journey from Europe.
Think your smartphone camera is fast? A group of scientists have made a camera that can shoot 156 trillion frames per second. The swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography, or SCARF, is designed for experiments where events happen too fast for most sensors to detect, paving the way for scientific breakthroughs in engineering and medicine. Read more from Engadget about the device.
How are we building the largest #telescope dome ever? In the latest episode of Chasing Starlight we take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of the dome of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope in #Chile
It's 88 m wide and 80 m tall, and it will shelter the ELT and its optics & instruments from the harsh environment of the Atacama Desert –– a true feat of #engineering
Achievement unlocked! The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope are on their way to #Chile 🇨🇱
The huge 39.3 m mirror of the telescope will comprise 798 of these hexagonal segments, plus 133 spares, as we'll eventually have to remove a couple of them every day to recoat them with a reflective layer.
This is Vietnamese laser programmer and performance artist Lại Trần Ninh Kiềm. He is doing some mind-blowing things with his art form.
The transition between environmental and manual control of the lasers is wild. And he has meticulous, granular-level control over the illusion. It’s quite remarkable.
The engineering faculty I work in used to have “Change the World” as a slogan. I never liked it and I’ve just worked out why. It’s because The World is fine. What we need to be doing is changing ourselves so that we fit in with our fully functioning life support system - Earth - learning how to work with the great planetary cycles that keep us alive rather than against them.
Maybe the new engineering slogan should be “Working out how to do better”.
Tear-resistant rubbery materials could pave the way for tougher tires (www.sciencenews.org)
Adding easy-to-break molecular connectors surprisingly makes materials harder to tear and could one day reduce microplastic pollution from car tires.