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Don’t touch

lyledunn
Covid 19 has devastated the economy so perhaps in the interest of assisting in the mitigation of any similar reoccurrence, it might be prudent to consider minimising the the need to touch items to get them to function. This has been underway for quite some time where, for example, in heavily trafficked areas such as airports, faucets are electronically controlled. Maybe now is the time to regulate. I have been involved with design of licensed premises such as hotels and pubs for over 30 years. Budgets are often loosened for aesthetics and tightened for the functional side. Rarely would a design for automatic taps get client approval although it would do if they were mandatory. How daft is it to go to the expense of such items and then require a visitor to the toilets to pull a door handle to effect an exit?

it is good to see automatic operation of lighting becoming commonplace, probably due to building regulation requirements but I am sure that there are many other things that we could do to reduce the need to touch things to get them to work.
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  • 0
    Zoomup:

    A newspaper reporter recently observed that a good germ spreader is the Doctor's surgery electronic check in screen where all the ill have to touch the pad to check in.


    Z.


    In my surgery the check-in screen has been turned off, probably due to this virus thing. One now needs to go to the reception window and announce one's arrival to a real person. Not exactly a new idea.


    Oops, I almost forgot. One may still need to press a button to ring a bell to summon attention. Perhaps the bell should be actuated by the automatic door mechanism.


    The light switches, in a building where I used to work, looked ordinary enough and functioned as expected. But they were part of a central lighting control system. The idea of this system, so I was told, was to provide a master switch so that at the end of the day's business, the care-taking staff could switch off all the lights in the building together.


    The building was near an airfield and the trouble was there were EMC problems with aircraft radio. Sometimes, when an aircraft flew low overhead, the lights would go out and had to be switched on again.


    The pity was that the caretakers never used the system in this manner. They preferred to go from room to room, checking that nobody was still inside, and switch off lights behind them as they locked up, thus marking their progress.


    Technology can be great, but sometimes I think over-use of it is not the best way.


Reply
  • 0
    Zoomup:

    A newspaper reporter recently observed that a good germ spreader is the Doctor's surgery electronic check in screen where all the ill have to touch the pad to check in.


    Z.


    In my surgery the check-in screen has been turned off, probably due to this virus thing. One now needs to go to the reception window and announce one's arrival to a real person. Not exactly a new idea.


    Oops, I almost forgot. One may still need to press a button to ring a bell to summon attention. Perhaps the bell should be actuated by the automatic door mechanism.


    The light switches, in a building where I used to work, looked ordinary enough and functioned as expected. But they were part of a central lighting control system. The idea of this system, so I was told, was to provide a master switch so that at the end of the day's business, the care-taking staff could switch off all the lights in the building together.


    The building was near an airfield and the trouble was there were EMC problems with aircraft radio. Sometimes, when an aircraft flew low overhead, the lights would go out and had to be switched on again.


    The pity was that the caretakers never used the system in this manner. They preferred to go from room to room, checking that nobody was still inside, and switch off lights behind them as they locked up, thus marking their progress.


    Technology can be great, but sometimes I think over-use of it is not the best way.


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