22  UoN interference examples

🏠 Self-study

22.1 The School of Psychology lift

The floors in the Psychology building are labelled LG (lower ground), A, B and C. Confusingly, for a while the labels in the lift were A, B, C and D:

Lift buttons labelled A, B, C and D.

So, in the lift, the LG floor was the A floor, the A floor was the B floor, and so on. If you wanted to go to, say, the C floor, you needed to press D in the lift:

Lift display shows D, but door sign shows the floor is C.

That this was confusing did not go unnoticed and someone decided to print a guide in an attempt to make things less confusing:

Signs guide for remapping the buttons.

Note Food for thought

What do you think about this design? Do you think you can design a better version? What would your version look like?

Here is my suggestion. I would argue that you can’t really “ignore” the existing buttons as the design above suggests. In my view, a sign like this would have been clearer:

Alternative signs guide for remapping the buttons.

22.2 The ESLC floor plan map

Then again, what the lift sign did get right is the spatial relationship of the floors. For example, Floor C is located above Floor B, and this spatial relationship is reflected on the sign. Makes intuitive sense, right? Because of this, one should think that this principle is adhered to everywhere. Well, not in our ESLC building. In this building, the A floor is the ground floor, the B floor is one floor up and the C floor is the top floor. On the building’s floor plan map, however, the A floor is on top and the C floor is at the bottom:

Floor plan map of the Engineering and Science Learning Centre, with the A floor shown at the top and the C floor at the bottom.

This creates a spatial incongruency that could have been avoided by having the floors on the map reflect the real-world physical arrangement of the floors.