Observations on Surviving a Disaster: A Costa Concordia Concord

I've never been attracted to cruise ship vacations and I'm even less interested now that I've seen the news of the Costa Concordia disaster. But any disaster also makes me imagine what it must have been like to be there. My guess is that the chaos of the evacuation and subsequent rescues were quite typical of many disasters even though the Captain of the Costs Concordia appears to have been especially inept.

Being able to quickly and safely evacuate something as big as a town, particularly when it happens to be in the middle of the ocean seems like a tall order under any circumstances let alone when the ship is sinking. Cruise ship companies say they can evacuate everyone on board within a very short window of time but I wonder if their projections take into account passengers of various mental and physical abilities, the inevitable crew problems, and the fact that escape routes will be changing as the ship sinks. It makes me wonder whether the race to build ever bigger cruise ships is right from a safety perspective. Beyond the specific players of the Costa Concordia, it seems like there are lessons to be learned here for any disaster.

In the critical minutes after disaster strikes, those in charge may be in denial of the scale of the emergency
This certainly seems to be the case with the captain of the Costa Concordia. Passengers may need to question decisions if they don't jibe with what you're seeing. Admitting the problem and calling for an "abandon ship" is perhaps the best and worst thing a captain might have to do from a career perspective so he or she may be reluctant to do so even when all signs point to it's necessity. You should expect a lack of clear communication. Worse, they may also feed bad information to subordinates who will then be feeding it to you. The many calls for passengers to return to their cabins was an example of this. If my cabin was any lower than the top level, I'd be high-tailing up to the open decks to keep my options open.

Drills and exercises may not adequately prepare crew members for the chaos of a full-on disaster
In the face of extreme emergency, almost anyone is likely to be overwhelmed or perhaps experiencing disbelief. Highly functioning organizations like the Navy Seals, the Marines, and fire departments drill over and over so reactions become second nature. On a cruise ship, the crew's normal day-to-day "drill" is running a hotel, keeping guests happy and literally re-arranging deck chairs. Should we really expect them to act as well as a marine or paramedic in the face of death and disaster?

Even well-thought out emergency plans have to change in reaction to the specifics of a disaster
Ever since the Titanic, cruise ships have to carry enough life boats for everyone on board. But what happens when a sinking ship quickly lists to one side? Do they carry twice as many life boats as needed? Life boats on both sides of the Costa Concordia became inoperable when the ship tipped under water on one side and got stuck on the other, high side. Timing is also an issue. Can lifeboats be filled and deployed right away or do denial, chaos and disorganization conspire to delay some boats and send others away half empty.

There are many stories of survivors from other disasters who lived only because they took matters into their own hands and scrambled for exits while others hesitated and died. Perhaps the one smart thing the captain did among the many bad things was to aim the ship for land and beach it close enough for some to jump and swim to shore. This allowed a few brave souls to take matters into their own control. Beaching the boat also seems to have allowed lifeboats and other nearby ships to make multiple trips to and from the ship while others remained incapacitated. There were stories of some crew members unable to steer the boats away from the ship once they were full. Until you're experienced, steering a boat can be counter-intuitive. Yet another example of inadequate training. The drills probably extend to getting the boats lowered into the water but do they include experience once under power?

I hope I never know what it's like to experience a disaster of this magnitude. But if I do, I plan to listen to what officials have to say, decide whether the plan makes sense and then play an active role in my own survival.

In Time, "Form Follows Function"

In Louis Sullivan's classic statement, "Form Follows Function" it is function that is usually seen as the dominant member of this design duality. It was one of the first design tenets that I learned in college and one that remains a core part of my design philosophy to this day. That said, I can't think of a single design project where the opposite wasn't true at least some of the time. The truth is that we are visual beings. We are often quick and astute judges of form. We know when something looks right and when it looks wrong, even if we haven't studied design. On top of this, function can rarely be judged at a quick glance. By definition, you must use the object, building, shirt, service before you can truly judge it's functional quality. The net result of this is that many designs are judged based on their form first and function second… despite Sullivan's admonition.

In my experience, most designers remain faithful to one camp even as they evolve to see both sides of the coin. I see many function-minded designers create mockups that address many of the requirements but result in a design that is awkward and ugly. I also see many form-focused designers who are almost incapable of creating an ugly mark on a page but who excel at ignoring or forgetting key user needs. The best products are the result of hard work at addressing issues on both sides of the fence.

I also notice this dialog happening in my own design process. I remain focused on function in my heart but I've acknowledged how often this has resulted in a proposal that, though more functional has lost out to a more stylish alternate proposal. I find myself removing details from concept proposals to postpone discussions of thorny requirements. As I was pondering this issue while reading some of Don Norman's teachings, I realize I am not the first functionalist to come to this understanding.

I remember hearing Don Norman speak at TED about his revelation that function was not everything. If I remember it correctly, he talked about a response to his concerns about light switches and burner controls on a stove. In both examples, the mapping of the controls usually relates poorly if at all to the mapping of the actual lights or burners. So, in order to prove his point, he redesigned the light switch for his living room so it featured a floor plan with the switches placed in close relation to the light switch it controlled. The result was highly functional but one of the most ugly light switches I've ever seen. Apparently his wife agreed and told him she hated the switch and wanted the old, less functional one back. I remember seeing the light switch in his book and thinking it a monstrosity of design. I recall a similar scenario with train schedules in Edward Tufte's first book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

Mies Van der Rohe was such a big proponent of "form follows function" that he is often credited with penning the quote. Mies is famous for his simple, Germanic designs both in elevation and plan. Details are all thought out but as minimal as possible. A skyscraper is a series of vertical I-beams with Windows in between each I-beam. Mies' belief in this tenet was so strong that he broke his own belief on his design of the Seagram Building to make the point. Though I-beams are a basic element of every skyscraper, it is rare that the beams are left exposed. Most of covered in fireproofing and then hidden behind a cladding or wall. Mies Van der Rohe's answer to this on the Seagram Building was to basically add a decorative I-beam to the outermost edge of his facade. These I-beams are pure decoration… no different than the heavy rustication used in Renaissance villas or the highly ornate terra-cotta tiles on many of Louis Sullivan's early skyscrapers.

All of this makes me think of the original statement. Mies started the building with the best of purely functional intentions. But he knew in his heart that there was an aesthetic to what he was proposing and that he sometimes needed to stray into the realm of form to make his functional ambitions clear. Sullivan's early skyscrapers are known as much for the heavy use of ornament… maybe as a way to soften the shock of the sudden appearance of tall structures in the urban landscape. Perhaps his strong belief in his own statement took for granted that ornament (one type of form) would always be present. As one element of a building, ornament should be applied in a way that follows the lines (function) of the building rather than in an otherwise unrelated pattern.

Since I am grounded on the functional side, I can not speak for the process of those that are on the form side of the equation. For me, I start with function, then proceed to adjusting the form to make a more visually pleasing solution. So, from a scheduling perspective, form does follow function. My success is for others to decide but that is my process.

A Map of the Border Between the USA and Canada as it Passes Through the Town of Derby Line, Vermont

A Map of the Border Between the USA and Canada as it Passes Through the Town of Derby Line, Vermont, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

The story of Derby Line Vermont begins with a mistake and ends with an intentional act inspired by the mistake. For most of it's 2000 mile length, the USA / Canada border follows the 45th parallel. I have already written about the exception at the Northwest Angle in Minnesota that was created due to an error about how far North the Mississippi River went. Here in Vermont, the surveyors were intending to follow the 45th parallel, they were just a bit sloppy in their work and unintentionally marked the line too far North. The Town developed along the line along with it's sister town, Stanstead Quebec on the Canadian side.

Sometime in the latter part of the 1800s, Carlos Haskell an American met Martha Stewart (not that Martha Stewart) who had grown up on the Canadian side. They married and settled in Derby Line. Sometime around the turn of the century, they decided to honor the town's erratic border by building a library and opera house right on the border so that Americans and Canadians would both be able to use it. If I were erecting such a monument, I think I would have aligned the building so the border passed symbolically through the middle. Not so with the Haskell Free Library as it came to be known. The border passes diagonally through the building. The line is marked in the floor (you can see pictures of the interior at the CLUI link below). The line was requested by the insurance companies so they would pay only for damages to their part of the building.

In the library, the reading room is on the US side while the stacks are on the Canadian side. In the upstairs opera house, most of the seats are on the US side while the stage is on the Canadian side. This has prompted locals to call it alternatively, "the only library in the USA with no books" and "the only opera house in the USA with no stage".

Having such a small town straddles an international border invites a different perspective on international relations. The Center for Land Use Interpretation has an essay about the town on their website. The author makes the comment that two kids having a game of catch across the border would be perfectly legal. However, each time someone caught the ball they would have to walk over to the customs office to declare the ball.

When the Haskell's built the library, their intention was that people from both sides of the border would be able to use it. There are doors on the Canadian and USA side to enable this. The town also has several small roads that cross seamlessly across the border. All of this is threatened in the post-9/11 world because open, fuzzy borders make the US Department of Customs and Immigration nervous. There have been talks to tighten the links but, according to Wikipedia at least, the Haskell Free Library remains free and open to American and Canadian alike.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_Line,_Vermont
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618080148/http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/26/border.quirk.ap/index.html
http://www.clui.org/lotl/v29/m.html

The Border Between Egypt & Sudan at the Wadi Halfa Salient

The Border Between Egypt & Sudan at the Wadi Halfa Salient, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

See the 52 villages in the map? No? That's because they were flooded by the damning of the Nile and the creation of Lake Nasser (known as Lake Nubia in Sudan). The strange bulge (known as a salient in cartography parlance) along this portion of the Egypt-Sudan border was originally surrounded the villages that dotted this section of the Nile.

Egypt and Sudan have 3 areas of land under dispute and a fourth that neither country claims. The original 1899 border between the two countries ran straight along the 22nd North Parallel line with no deviations. In 1902, Britain amended the border to account for some tribal and administrative issues. There were 52 villages where the Nile River crossed the 22nd Parallel. It was decided that these villages would be easier to maintain from the Sudanese side of the border so the border was changed to how it appears above. There appears to be a stretch of rough and desolate terrain North of this area that separates it from the next set of villages in current maps.

Egypt now claims this area along with the other two areas (Bir Tawil and the Hala'ib Triangle) in dispute. They maintain a military presence in the other two but not here as there is little of interest to guard. My map of Bir Tawil and the Hala'ib Triangle is here.

I've also made a map of the area showing the location of the former towns and ruins based on a 1953 British survey map.

Source: Wikipedia

Still (un)certain after all these years

I've been a user interface / interaction / user experience design for over 20 years. After all that time, I still don't feel 100% confident that an interface I'm working on is the perfect interface for the intended users. The place where interactive digital systems meet a range of interacting people is simply too hard to predict. One thing I am 100% sure of... I don't trust anyone who feels they know the right answer after little thought and consideration.

A Map of the Strange Border Between New York & New Jersey on Ellis Island

A Map of the Border Between New York & New Jersey on Ellis Island, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

For so many immigrants, stepping off a ship onto Ellis Island was synonymous with arrival in New York City. Many years later, after the immigration station had closed and the buildings lie decaying, the US Supreme Court would decide that Ellis Island, with one small exception, was part of New Jersey.

The original colonial land grant for New Jersey defined it's border as the waterline of New York Bay and the Hudson River, meaning that the water and all islands within it belonged to New York. Most treaties place borders in the middle of natural borders like lakes and rivers. New Jersey tried to fight the claim starting in the early 1800s. In 1834 a compact between New York and New Jersey and ratified by the US Congress set the border as the middle of the Hudson River. This put jurisdiction and bragging rights over the island completely in New Jersey which they were quick to assert and claim in a court filing. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. New York fought hard but in the end was awarded only the small 3.3 acre section of the original island. Since that border follows the island's original shoreline it appears quite random today and passes through the middle of numerous buildings. The majority of the current island (most of it created by landfill from the digging of New York City subway tunnels) is now officially part of the State of New Jersey. Payback for Jersey's actions and perhaps the best argument for custody came from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani who remarked that his Italian father "never intended to emigrate to New Jersey."

In the pre-colonial days, Ellis Island was one of several, oyster-rich islands on the western tidal flats of Upper New York Bay. Other nearby islands included Liberty Island (originally Bedloe's Island and site of the Statue of Liberty) and Black Tom Island (named after an African-American that lived on the island according to local legend). Before becoming known as Ellis Island, it had been known as Dyre's Island, Bucking, Gibbet (Gibbet's being cages for displaying the dead bodies of convicted pirates), and lastly, Little Oyster Island. Samuel Ellis acquired the island during the American Revolution and first tried to sell it in 1785. New York State leased the island in 1794 until the Federal Government bought the island in 1808 and began expanding it before opening it as an immigration station in 1892.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_island & Google Maps

Via Flickr:
For so many immigrants, stepping off a ship onto Ellis Island was synonymous with arrival in New York City. Many years later, after the immigration station had closed and the buildings lie decaying, the US Supreme Court would decide that Ellis Island, with one small exception, was part of New Jersey.

The original colonial land grant for New Jersey defined it's border as the waterline of New York Bay and the Hudson River, meaning that the water and all islands within it belonged to New York. Most treaties place borders in the middle of natural borders like lakes and rivers. New Jersey tried to fight the claim starting in the early 1800s. In 1834 a compact between New York and New Jersey and ratified by the US Congress set the border as the middle of the Hudson River. This put jurisdiction and bragging rights over the island completely in New Jersey which they were quick to assert and claim in a court filing. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. New York fought hard but in the end was awarded only the small 3.3 acre section of the original island. Since that border follows the island's original shoreline it appears quite random today and passes through the middle of numerous buildings. The majority of the current island (most of it created by landfill from the digging of New York City subway tunnels) is now officially part of the State of New Jersey. Payback for Jersey's actions and perhaps the best argument for custody came from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani who remarked that his Italian father "never intended to emigrate to New Jersey."

In the pre-colonial days, Ellis Island was one of several, oyster-rich islands on the western tidal flats of Upper New York Bay. Other nearby islands included Liberty Island (originally Bedloe's Island and site of the Statue of Liberty) and Black Tom Island (named after an African-American that lived on the island according to local legend). Before becoming known as Ellis Island, it had been known as Dyre's Island, Bucking, Gibbet (Gibbet's being cages for displaying the dead bodies of convicted pirates), and lastly, Little Oyster Island. Samuel Ellis acquired the island during the American Revolution and first tried to sell it in 1785. New York State leased the island in 1794 until the Federal Government bought the island in 1808 and began expanding it before opening it as an immigration station in 1892.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_island

A Map of the very strange border(s) between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Nassau

A Map of the very strange border(s) between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Nassau, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

Without going into excruciating detail about allegiances to dukes, lords and kings, it is hard to explain the origin if this rather unique set of international borders. Suffice it to say that the land was bought, sold, and loaned through many generations to the point where the current land owners felt allegiance to either the Dutch or Belgian side of the border. When it came time to make the border official as art of the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht, 5732 separate parcels of land had to have their nationality laid down separately.

Fortunately the borders are all friendly. In fact, there were several opportunities to clean things up in subsequent treaties and negotiations that the residents refused to act on. The residents of Baarle-Nassau seem to enjoy their quirky borders and the ramifications they present.

There is at least one border line that passes directly through a building. With borders sometimes passing through the middle of properties, taxes were sometimes a challenge in the area. To clarify matters, the Dutch government set the rule that taxes would be paid to the country your front door opened up on. With taxes being higher on one side of the border than the other, the ruling was an invitation for creative renovations. If shop keepers didn't like the taxes they were paying, they were known to just move their front door so that it opened on the other country.

The primary border between the two countries lies about 5 kilometers south of Baarle-Nassau... just a short distance beyond the bottom of this map. What is truly unique about this set of borders is that it happens completely inside the Netherlands border. These are Belgian exclaves inside the Netherlands. But even more amazing is that there are Dutch exclaves completely inside the Belgian exclaves. The smallest plot, identified as H12 is just 28,331 square feet (a bit more than 1/2 an acre) in size. With all of the dysfunction between Israel and the Palestinians over land swaps, it is nice to see two countries getting along so well that there's no need to swap.

Sources:
Google Maps
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/baarle.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau