New lamps for old

When you work for the same company for a long time, you get to watch their building management over the years, sometimes with interesting side effects and hidden messages.

I visited our offices at Bracknell today. Over the past year or so they've been engaged in a refurbishment programme for the lifts in the tower block (10 floors) and decided on a very high-tech system that uses the very latest software and algorithms to achieve the most efficient pattern of lift travel between floors. To achieve this, the lift has to be able to plot its route in conjunction with the other lifts and the demands of the users. Lift designers worked out that the most efficient way of doing this was if the users could choose their destination floor at the time they called the lift, rather than once they were inside.

So the lift call buttons were replaced with touch-sensitive screens displaying the numbers 0-10, and users were supposed to touch the button for their floor, at which point the display would change briefly to tell the user which of the (up to three) lifts they should take once it arrived. Once in the lift, the only buttons available were the usual door open, close and alarm buttons. There was no way of selecting a floor from inside the lift. To do so would defeat the pre-scheduled route of the lift and make the operation less than optimal.

This was the clearest case of technology driving its users that I have ever seen. Usability and human-oriented features were abandoned in favour of the holy grail of achieving the most efficient servicing of the outstanding calls. The whole idea was to speed up the total time for each individual's journey. As it turned out, it had almost uniformly the opposite effect.

Visitors to the building often didn't realise they had to pick a floor number, especially when other people were already waiting for the lift. They would get into a lift only to find no way of selecting a floor. Those who had selected a floor would occasionally forget which lift they had been told to take, and get into the wrong one. Again, no override was possible. Arriving at the lifts at the last minute, it was impossible to dive into the one that was just leaving. If you hadn't selected your floor it could be going anywhere (a display panel inside the lift lit up the floors it would be calling at, but riders couldn't influence the journey). Finally at peak times, the delays as the display switched between "select" mode and "please take lift X" mode for each person led to large queues building up and half-empty lifts leaving the ground floor because the remaining users hadn't had time to select their floors.

After a few months and much grumbling the scheme was abandoned, and refurbished lifts are now having an internal panel fitted to allow riders to select floors in the normal way.

By way of contrast, in a less public but just as essential part of the building, refurbishment is long overdue. I remember when the gents' lavatories were last refurbished in this building and it must be at least 20 years ago. At the time, they were the height of lavatorial chic. Now, there is hardly a square centimetre of chrome remaining on any of the taps, the basins are cracked, the taps drip when they're turned off, and never run at very much more than a drip when they're turned on. The floors have been mopped so many times they're almost worn away and the whole place has an air of abandonment that is most depressing.

I can't help feeling that a little less high-tech in the lifts would have freed up some funds for a much-needed revamp of the "facilities." Maybe next year...