You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where? (NY Times Op-Ed: 12 March 2004)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:57:16 -0500 (EST)
From: GLIGOR1 () aol com
Subject: You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where? (NY Times Op-Ed: 12 March 2004)
To: dave () farber net

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March 12, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where?

By HARVEY MOLOTCH

f
or anyone who has flown recently, chances are that the airport security 
checkpoint — that travel sppot where anxious human beings meet guards and 
their equipment — didnn't provide a very nice experience. Surely there has 
to be a better way for the paraphernalia on one's person (or in one's 
person: think pacemaker) to mesh with instruments and instructions that are 
supposed to ward off trouble. While the ordinary goods of daily life 
receive exacting attention from industrial designers, ergonomic experts and 
human behavior analysts, airport security artifacts are the products of 
casual indifference. The stuff is terrible.

Before your next flight, take a closer look (not close enough to stir 
suspicions, just closer). The trays where you put your laptop or packages 
are off-the-shelf products never meant for airport use. They are for busing 
dishes in restaurants. The plastic bowls for your coins and cellphone were 
meant for nail salons and institutions serving people not to be trusted 
with ceramic (the one I turned over at Kennedy Airport was Rubbermaid). The 
"recovery" tables where travelers retrieve their luggage on the other side 
of the X-ray scanners are the fold-ups one finds in church recreation halls.

Adapting goods for new purposes can be ingenious, but not in this case. 
Coins tumble to the floor; people slow down the line as they struggle to 
lift their suitcases onto the conveyor belt and into the scanners. 
Strollers get tangled in equipment, worried people lunge for film they fear 
will be radiated. Some travelers simply do not get any instructions because 
they do not speak English. Folks tending to be a little mixed up in 
ordinary life are also prone to mix up their duty-free receipts with the 
boarding pass. Some travelers come undone. The mishaps distract the guards, 
forcing them to interrupt their work and call for reinforcements.

None of this is good for passengers, for airlines or for security. There 
are alternatives, some of which are not rocket science. The change bowls 
need some kind of funnel shape to help coins spill back into a cupped hand. 
The trays should have rubber linings to protect electronic goods against 
vibration and to prevent gifts from breaking. The platforms to the conveyor 
belts should slant down so that travelers don't have to lift their luggage 
as high. More ambitiously, the whole operation needs systematic analysis — 
just like one that an industrial designer would conduct for a car model or 
can opener. The result could be a radically different configuration of 
apparatus, queues and sensibilities.

The personnel also need a rethinking. The government employees now on duty 
have better training and demeanors than the hapless private contract 
workers they replaced, but they are still set up to control. They engage in 
a regime of instruction, prohibition and surveillance. Travelers are 
expected to toe the line: lift that laptop, take off those shoes and make 
no wrong jokes. The security personnel are not there as helpers. So old 
people struggle by themselves to get their luggage up, parents herd unruly 
toddlers through the metal detectors and novice flyers worry about which of 
their things go where and just when and how they will be retrieved.

Having employees help people with their luggage could have security 
advantages. The security workers could see the stuff and feel the goods — 
their heft, sounds and textures. They could observe the faces of the owners 
and how those faces respond to offers for help. The presence of helpers 
would also reassure and increase the confidence of those who fumble, 
causing them to fumble less. And, hardly a small matter, people have a 
better time.

As security concerns inject more checkpoints into our lives, the same 
questions of design arise. Will there be detailed caring or only command 
and control? As accomplished designers know, a good appliance blends 
machine and person for both functionality and pleasure. Cumulatively, all 
the little machine-human interactions build into psychological and social 
states of place and culture. The conditions at airport security checkpoints 
show that despite having many millions of dollars to invest, the custodians 
have not come up with a decent design.

Given the usual worries of getting to the airport, weather delays and (now) 
the threat of mayhem in the skies, flying is anxiety-ridden enough. Isn't 
it time for someone in charge to go out there and redo things?

Harvey Molotch, a professor of metropolitan studies and sociology at New 
York University, is the author of "Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, 
Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are."

<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>Copyright 2004 
<http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company

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