Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Given that everyone focuses on improving efficiencies, whether at a personal level or at work, it’s interesting to know that there are some situations where things are deliberately made inefficient. And not for the slow down to smell the roses reasons, but to actually improve the overall experience! The most well-known example of a system that was deliberately made inefficient is the way the letters are organized on a keyboard (the QWERTY arrangement). Designed for the typewriter era, the idea was to slow down a typist so that he couldn’t cause the typewriter’s keys to collide and jam. Now, of course, we’re stuck with the inefficient QWERTY arrangement because that’s what everyone’s learnt and is familiar with! Even in the realm of biology and life, there are advantages to being slightly inefficient. Like the pathogens that cause diseases. If they were uber-efficient and killed their hosts too fast, then they’d die out (along with the host) before they could be transmitted t...

Open up a car or a generator and it’s easy to see what Jack Zylkin, creator of the USB Typewriter (see pic below) calls the “muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids fitting together in perfect harmony”. Zylkin says one can’t see the same magic upon opening electronic gadgets up. True, but just because you can’t “see” the harmony in your phone or laptop doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In any case, is it even worth anybody’s time to design an electronics gadget very well? After all, electronic items are born and die at Mach speed. It’s like evolution on steroids. I find the combination of a digital tablet with an analog typewriter amusing: after all, the QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically to slow down typists (so that a fast typist on a typewriter wouldn’t cause the keys to collide), while pretty much every keyboard on a phone or a tablet today tries to speed up typing by predicting words as you type! Stone Age, meet the Digital Age.