<story><title>Why your child&apos;s school bus has no seat belts</title><url>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820669/ns/us_news-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotBen</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact,&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child&apos;s body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.&lt;p&gt;I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as &apos;unfriending&apos; someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user&apos;s perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.&lt;p&gt;I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as &quot;going against the seat&quot; or &quot;unfriending&quot;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;(nb: I&apos;m not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>I don&apos;t disagree that &quot;we could make better products&quot; when analyzing things from a human point of view — that&apos;s practically day 0 in any industrial design class — but I dispute the implicit comparison here. It&apos;s extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn&apos;t think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life.&lt;p&gt;It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them &lt;i&gt;work&lt;/i&gt;, is distinctly beyond human terms. It&apos;s why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we&apos;re working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job&apos;s recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of &quot;technology&quot; and &quot;liberal arts&quot;. Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why your child&apos;s school bus has no seat belts</title><url>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820669/ns/us_news-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotBen</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact,&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child&apos;s body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.&lt;p&gt;I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as &apos;unfriending&apos; someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user&apos;s perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.&lt;p&gt;I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as &quot;going against the seat&quot; or &quot;unfriending&quot;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;(nb: I&apos;m not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jameskilton</author><text>Well there&apos;s also the fact that kids bodies are much more malleable than the average adult body, and given that as crashes aren&apos;t expected, the kids won&apos;t be tensing up when they hit the seat and will kind of flop around a bit. Same reason drunk drivers almost never die in the accidents they cause. In most cases I would bet that the bus crash wasn&apos;t traumatic for the kids but something exciting they&apos;ll talk about for a while.</text></comment>