Dear friends,
After a healthy break for the holidays, I’m back with another chapter of User Zero. We pick up at chapter 15. Good stuff in this one including: bathroom humor, guerrilla public service, and death by Segway.
Wishing you the best in 2024. There are only ten chapters/weeks left to share in my book. Thanks as always for supporting me.
Your friend,
Ade
“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.” —Buckminster Fuller
You will experience a brief sense of panic when you encounter a blank page. We are so accustomed to every inch of space being crammed with information that when we encounter emptiness, our past experience tells us that something must be wrong. “Was there a mistake? Is a page missing? What do I do?” Anticipating this instinctual response, empty pages often get printed with a single line of text declaring, “This page is intentionally blank.” You are most likely to encounter this message in legal documents or exam papers.
If it were possible to reverse engineer these blank pages would you really find intention? Was this a carefully debated decision, or the output of an opaque process? It could be that somebody was thinking ahead, anticipating the panic that a user would experience when they arrived at that blank page. Presumably, the designer wanted to avoid the blank page altogether but was forced to compromise and the “intentionally blank” message was the result.
It is just as likely that no human was directly involved in the blank page’s creation. A series of rules in an automated process may have resulted in an empty page. The rule “if empty page, then print blank message” executed flawlessly.
All printed words are the by-product of chains of thought. Some chains are deep and complex, having survived the gauntlet of committees, legal departments, and public relations specialists. Other chains are so transparent that you can practically hear the mind of the author in the words. Like the “Not to be used for housing” signs stuck to the toxic trailers of chapter three, signs often leave residue of the flawed thinking that lead to their creation. When I see a hand-written sign, whether it is on a bathroom stall, or a passive-aggressive note in a break room, I always try to imagine the events that lead up to these words. How many times was the coffee machine not refilled before someone took the time to craft the hand-made sign? How often was Susan’s sandwich consumed by co-workers prior to that note?
In 2001, Richard Ankrom vandalized a highway sign in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike graffiti artists, Ankrom’s art project went unnoticed for nine months. The illegal art that Ankrom added to the sign was not spray paint, but an exact replica of an Interstate 5 shield. Years earlier, Ankrom had missed his exit and saw an opportunity to save other drivers from getting lost. Ankrom studied the official manuals, measured the thickness of the materials, matched the colors and typefaces, and then installed the sign himself. Posing as a contractor, Ankrom ascended the sign, walked above multiple lanes of traffic, and secured the shield as cars passed 30 feet below. With his vandalism complete, Ankrom fled the scene undetected.
When the story of Ankrom’s guerrilla public service leaked, inspectors from the California Department of Transportation evaluated Ankrom’s work and concluded that it met their standards and they left the sign up.
Elsewhere in California, citizens battling for improved signage in their swimming pools have had less luck than Ankrom. If you have entered a public swimming pool in California you’ve encountered the uncomfortable diarrhea warning signage. On September 1, 2012, the California Building Code was updated to include new safety sign requirements:
“The pool operator shall post at the entrance area of a public pool a sign in letters at least 1 inch (25 mm) high that clearly states that persons with diarrhea and persons who have had diarrhea within the prior 14 days shall not enter the pool water.”
Undoubtedly there were good intentions behind this legislation, but the result is a public display of legislative incompetence that has littered every pool in California with patronizing signs that cover entire walls. It seems that the only recourse we have is to laugh at the crude signs or vandalize them. Indeed, the diarrhea signs have become prime candidates for thieves looking for ironic artwork to appropriate.
In one case you have negative space on an interstate sign where helpful information could benefit drivers. In the other situation, public space is littered with patronizing messages that are required by law.
When users feel like they are being talked down to, they mock the offensive sign. If you’ve used a public bathroom equipped with older hand dryers, you may have seen vandalism where the instructions for the dryer have been scratched out to reveal new advice.
Newer hand dryers learned from the vandalism and removed the text in favor of universal icons. Users struck back, adding “Push Button, Receive Bacon” instructions to assist confused users.
In theory, a hand dryer doesn’t need instructions. The affordances of the air vent and the big button give adequate clues to a first time user to figure out the machine through trial-and-error. And yet, even 70+ years after the introduction of the electric hand dryer, signs are still added to the machines just in case it is your first time in a public bathroom.
Newer hand dryers, of course, remove the button too. Insert your hands in the hand-shaped space and the Dyson Airblade’s fans automatically kick on. What could go wrong? Perhaps my favorite hand-made sign of all time comes from a bathroom where a new Dyson hand dryer had been installed. The sign reads, “Attention: This is not a urinal.”
An eternal war continues to play out in restrooms. Paper towels duel with noisy fans in a death match for hand drying supremacy. Here, in the most public of spaces we see modern technology colliding with tradition. Could there be anything more primitive than wet hands being dried by a dry towel? Perhaps it is surprising that paper towels are still able to put up a fight in the modern age of smartphones and self-driving cars. There isn’t much lower tech than a piece of paper. The smart bet, it would seem, would be to put your money on the side of technology. And yet the war between paper and fans is far from over.
On one side you have the paper towel industry. On the other side you have manufacturers of electric hand dryers. This is not a friendly rivalry, it is a war for survival. Both sides have everything to gain by disparaging the other side. Pro-paper companies fund studies that prove air dryers spread disease. Anti-paper companies fund studies that prove how wasteful paper towels are. Both sides hire researchers who conduct studies whose results are pre-determined by the funder's agenda. The scientific method has been weaponized.
We tend to think of research as neutral. The word conjures pictures of scientific-folks in lab coats carefully conducting studies. The reality is less pristine. Research is expensive and it rarely gets funded without an agenda by the people writing the checks.
One study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology concluded that the Dyson hand dryer launches far more viruses into the air than other forms of hand drying. The research involved “washing” gloved hands with a virus solution and then drying them using:
a. Paper towels
b. An old-fashioned hand dryer
c. The Dyson Airblade
Next they measured how far the viral lotion was flung. Sure enough, the jet dryer distributed the viral lotion significantly farther than even the most violent paper towel simulations. I don’t have a PhD, but even I had a pretty good hunch that the air pressure generated by a paper towel was about a million times less than the force of a product referred to as a jet air dryer. Turns out I was wrong. It’s only 1,300 times stronger. My mistake. I guess that’s why people go to graduate school.
Forget the fact that everyone who uses a hand dryer has just washed their hands. Let’s accept the premise that diseased people are just sticking their infected unwashed hands in jet dryers for fun. Who needs an official study to be convinced that an air cannon can launch viral lube farther than a napkin?
Another “finding” of the study was that 70% of the virus flung by the hand dryer was at the height of a small child’s face. That sounds really scary until you stop and think about the height of the average hand dryer. Yes, they usually put them on the wall at about the height of a small child’s face.
When the conclusion is baked into the experiment, you can make a scientific study prove anything you want. This isn’t science, it is engineering tests that conform to your beliefs.
Even Dyson uses a study to back their claim that “up to 88% of paper towels in the U.S. contain bacteria.” The result of fake science like this is watered-down messages that once airborne form a putrid mist that consumers are forced to inhale. Attention marketers: this is not a urinal.
If you go to all the trouble of conducting a formal study just to discredit modern technology, however, you would think the researchers would have the guts to make a recommendation that might save the disease-ridden public from infecting ourselves with our own filth. No, instead we get this:
“The results of this study suggest that in locations where hygiene and cross-infection considerations are paramount, such as healthcare settings and the food industry, the choice of hand-drying method should be considered carefully.”
The science is incapable of picking a side in the war. No normal human has the patience to wade through a tedious study like this. It takes a journalist to sift through the academic jargon and pull out a Twitter-ready headline. When Ars Technica reported on the study, their headline read,
“Using a Dyson hand dryer is like setting off a viral bomb in a bathroom”
The sexed-up story spreads across the internet like viral lube hitting a fan. On the one hand you have the bland scientific drivel that avoids making a judgement for fear of offending industry giants. On the other you have the click-bait of tabloid-speak. What has the world come to when scientific minds are incapable of generating compelling words? What does it mean when a journalist must resort to shock-and-awe tactics in order to capture eyeballs?
And who gets damaged by the outrage shrapnel? The person who dedicated his life and fortune to creating world-improving products, James Dyson. After conquering the vacuum industry, James Dyson set his sights on improving the hand dryer. Americans use 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year and yet the hand dryer in most bathrooms has barely changed in half a century.
Sure, it’s so loud that it scares children, but Dyson’s Airblade has redeeming qualities, too. It dries hands in 12 seconds because the 400 MPH “blade” of air removes water extremely efficiently. It is more environmentally friendly because it uses less electricity and there is no paper waste. It is more hygienic because it is touch-free and covered with an antimicrobial coating. It has a low operating cost.
You would expect a device like the Airblade to be received with universal praise, but instead many people passionately hate these dryers. Critics of the Airblade say it is too loud. They say it is expensive. They say it is too stylish. They say it is hard to use. They say it is unhygienic. They say it steals its design from other companies. They say it blows water everywhere. They complain that their hands touch the sides. They point out that water drips down the side of the machine. A typical one-star Amazon review reads like this,
“Like many people, when I first saw the Dyson Airblade, I was repulsed and confused. Why on earth would someone manufacture a bathroom hand-dryer where the user's hands must be placed inside some sort of communal petri dish in order to operate it? Was the inventor some sort of gibbering idiot?”
This is how the apocalypse starts. Not by a viral outbreak, but by apathy. We are passive participants in an armageddon of mindlessness. Instead of praising the humanitarian designer, we applaud scientific non-accomplishments. Instead of encouraging innovative design, we re-tweet provocative headlines.
Meanwhile, the real heroes do the thankless work. James Dyson sums up his unsexy work like this,
“Our mission is simple. We solve the problems others seem to ignore.”
Battling weaponized research is about as easy as convincing legislatures to remove the mandate for diarrhea warnings on swimming pools. It takes extreme effort and the payoff is small. Unless you are a billionaire founder of a company like Dyson, you probably won’t fight the battle.
If the reward for attempting to solve big problems is public humiliation and aggressive research aimed at undermining your inventions, why would anyone volunteer for the job? Perhaps it would be better to die in obscurity, buried beneath a stone with the inscription, “Intentionally Blank.”
New innovations don’t just need to captivate the public, they are expected to change the world. Anything short of world domination is considered a failure.
It is easy to forget that before it was a punchline on late night television, the Segway was genuinely expected to usher in the city of the future. Fueled by investment from Jeff Bezos, and endorsed by Steve Jobs as “the most amazing piece of technology since the PC,” the hype surrounding the secret project lead to a public unveiling that took place on Good Morning America with the whole world watching. When the curtain went up, Diane Sawyer was underwhelmed. She said, “I’m tempted to say, ‘That’s it?’ but that can’t be it.”
Today if you ask a person on the street if they know who invented the Segway few will know the answer. Your question is practically guaranteed to be met with chuckles and jokes about mall cops, but the name of the Segway’s creator has escaped public awareness. Some people may recite the rumor that they heard that the inventor drove off a cliff. Shame is a powerful force and a public fall from grace might be enough to push a disgraced inventor over the edge. Would anyone blame him?
On September 26, 2010 a body at the base of a cliff was identified as Jimi Heselden, the millionaire owner of the company that made the Segway. No, it wasn’t suicide. Jimi was on a trail near his home riding the off-road version of the Segway. Seeing a fellow dog-walker ahead, Haselden pulled over to make room. Something about this maneuver went wrong and Haseleden disappeared over the edge, falling 42 feet to his death. Popular culture has misconstrued Jimi’s tragedy with the fate of the Segway’s actual inventor, Dean Kamen.
Despite being one of the world’s best inventors, Dean has managed to fly below the radar, never becoming a household name. The only thing worse than public shaming is being erased from history altogether. When it comes to Dean Kamen, the collective consciousness is intentionally blank. Allow me to attempt to uncover this cultural blind spot.
Before the Segway, Kamen invented the world’s first practical portable insulin pump, dramatically improving the quality of life of diabetic patients. He also created portable dialysis machines. The self-balancing technology that eventually made its way into the Segway first appeared in Kamen’s wheelchair that allowed handicapped riders to climb stairs. Kamen has applied his skills to prosthetic arms, solar power, and to solving the world’s clean water crisis.
If you’ve drank soda out of one of the touchscreen enabled Coca-Cola machines at a restaurant, you have used one of Kamen’s inventions. Kamen agreed to help Coca-Cola modernize fountain drink technologies in exchange for Coca-Cola’s help in distributing an invention Kamen calls slingshot to third world countries. Slingshot uses a vapor compression distillation system to generate enough clean water for 300 people a day.
The invention that Kamen is most proud of, however, is FIRST, a robotics competition started in 1989 that inspires K-12 students to apply their knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math.
“Throughout my life I only start on projects typically if enough credible people tell me, ‘You’re nuts. Because then you know, this must be a big problem.’”
Kamen echoes Tesla when he says,
“I like projects where there is a discontinuity, where you can’t use linear thinking to get from A to B to C to where we are. You have to take a big intellectual leap.”
Those big intellectual leaps have come with a cost. Instead of a hero, Kamen’s most famous invention is a laughing stock, a go-to punch line. The collective disdain of society is a hard thing to reverse. When a story takes hold in the collective mythology of a culture, we seem to become lemmings following our friends off of ledges. But as we shall see in the next chapter, even the legends of lemmings is deeply fake.