This post has no photos. None that I took anyway. Because taking photos is hard, while we navigate badly designed situations.
When we don’t understand or care about customer experience.
My flight on the world’s favourite airline ran out of disembarkation and customs declaration forms for India. For now, I shall refrain from commenting on this not-infrequent occurrence.
At Bombay’s International Airport arrivals, one had to pass immigration and then seek the customs forms. Near the desk called Customs, I asked where the forms could be found. I was told, in Marathi, “Near the flag”. The “flag” turned out to be a 1 inch by 1.5 inch plastic or paper thing hoisted on a 4-5 inch high pole, kept atop the counter, surrounded by so many things it was hard to see.
As it were, I took the last form they had. Since I was amongst the first to disembark, there was bound to be trouble after as many of us were without forms.
It is hard to imagine how such poor design decisions — organisation, choice of language of communication, quantities made available — helps those, who are not Indian, visiting India for the first time, and likely unfamiliar with the “jugaad” element so common to nearly everything in India.
When we sometimes use fancy new technology, but mostly not .. well, who cares?
I used a bathroom in a swanky new-built commercial building in Bombay’s famous Bandra Kurla Complex.
When I entered one of the loos, the light turned itself on. “Clever use of motion sensor technology”, I thought. Pun unintended, and not applicable, as you will see next.
Then I saw a manual flush handle in place. So the user of the loo touches the flush with what may not be clinically clean hands. “Could this not have been a sensor driven flush?”, I wondered.
Needing then to wash my hands at the basin, I saw the tap needed manual turning on. “Another lost chance to use a sensor”, I thought.
To dry my hands, I couldn’t find either tissue paper or a dryer. The attendant in the bathroom had to show me a broken almost hidden sensor with which I was to turn on an air-dryer. The dryer was located just above a bin where people had been discarding paper towels. Uh, ok.
In a tropical country teeming with dust, dirt and possible infections, all opportunities for fomites have been left intact in this fancy bathroom. Random things have been sensor-ised.
Well done. Not. On the obvious incomplete thinking in designing the bathroom.
When we don’t care about accessibility and safety..
Arriving from Bombay late at night, I was reminded why I avoid taking domestic flights to Delhi’s T1 terminal. As an able-bodied person, I was required to navigate a trolley amid 3-5 lanes of taxis and cars speeding toward the break in the Metro barrier, where I was to get out to wait for my car on the main road. Along with a gazillion other people.
Forget pedestrian priority, the awful road surface was its own challenge. Tough enough to push a baggage trolley till I saw a young airport staffer pushing — struggling with it actually — an old lady in a wheel chair towards the same exit, navigating the same cars coming at him and her at some speed.
When you get out, you find yourself on the road with many others, no identifiable markers anywhere. This means your driver has to inch closer, driving while on the mobile phone call with you till he visually locates you. Nice one, eh?
I thought about this airport experience for a while, but soon I had occasion to experience a new hotel and an orthopaedic hospital.
In India, nearly all bathrooms are wet rooms. This means that the probability of slipping is finite.
One might think this necessitates some mechanism for steadying oneself both in hotel and hospital bathrooms — not to mention a hospital, where people are suffering broken bones already.
None of the bathrooms had any grab bars or any support. In the hotel bathroom the shower area was treacherous, complete with black marble floor on which it is hard to distinguish dry and wet areas, while the bathroom in the orthopaedic hospital had no grab frames around the loo seat.
The absence of empathy in all these places, caring for neither accessibility nor safety, was quite disappointing.
Can we blame legacy?
None of these bad design experiences in these stories could be blamed on legacy. Each of them took place in a newly built, plush looking facility. The hotel is so new that as of October 2015, it had not formally opened. The hospital is about twenty years old. Bombay’s international airport opened for business in February 2014 while Delhi’s T1 is being renovated.
This was doubly disappointing.
So much money and material spent on building things comfortable and modern and pretty, but not a lot of time spent on thinking about making things that are fit for purpose!
There is a long way to go before the world is made at least comfortable for all of us.