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Fantasy meets reality

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253 pointsdmazin83 comments

The City Museum in St. Louis https://www.citymuseum.org/ is a wonderful counterexample to this: there are tunnels, sky-tubes made of rebar, slides, and a school bus hanging off the roof, and pretty much everything there is designed to be climbed-on, explored, and experienced.

...at your own risk. There's a feature called the Big Pig. It's a huge bucket that fills with a few hundred gallons of water and tips over, pouring it all out. In doing so, the bucket slams into a stop. There's rebar between where people go and the bucket, but there's enough space to get under the rebar, and to the bucket, and right in the way of the water. A woman did that, and put her hands on the stop. The bucket came down, she lost the fingers on one hand.

And she's not the only one. Multiple people have demonstrated lack of good sense, and injured themselves, at the City Museum. The ticket booth has a sign crediting a ticket surcharge to multiple law firms that have sued the museum over the years.

If you're ever in St. Louis, The City Museum should be near the top of your list of places to visit! Just don't climb on the Big Pig!

Whose fault is that - the designer, or the woman?

I'm not talking about tort law, or damages. I'm talking about morals, which are subjective.

If you build a structure that is designed to be climbed on and experienced (your words) and someone climbs on and experiences a part of it and is maimed for life - isn't that a little bit your fault?

> And she's not the only one. Multiple people have demonstrated lack of good sense, and injured themselves, at the City Museum.

If your open-to-the-public interactive structure causes maimings when the public encounters it (given that we know many of them lack good sense), those maimings are a little bit your personal responsibility and fault.

I'm pretty sure that a set of commodity, heavy-duty friction hinges would slow the bucket considerably - perhaps not enough to stop you getting your fingers stuck underneath the bucket, but enough to stop this from happening before the majority of the water had been poured out.

I think it adds yet more moral culpability when making the installation safer isn't particularly expensive, complicated or compromising to its value. This isn't an exhibit where danger is expected or inherent to the observers' experience.

Or a stop that moves the pinch-point further out of reach, and then clearly sign it off. This can be a hard thing to get right, but there definitely are solutions.

Sure, but the City Museum was created by an artist, who would have hated the idea of warning signs. He died in an accident building a companion outdoors art installation/amusement area, probably by not being safe while working with heavy equipment.

It's not particularly fast (or maybe this video is more recent and they have taken your advice), but obviously when you're talking about hundreds of pounds, the pinch point doesn't have to be fast to do damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDac5uSxLlg

>isn't that a little bit your fault?

If I invent a Sports game and someone falls playing it -- am I also responsible?

Certain structures have expectations e.g. a bridge should not prematurely collapse. A skyscraper should not fall over. Falling off a climbing frame is an 'expected risk' and therefore not the fault of the designer. A sign saying you're at risk is plenty of warning like a wet floor sign!

If there us a clear warning, definitely and only woman's fault. Pour enough people on/in/at literally anything and somebody is going to badly injure or even kill themselves on something trivial like a single stair.

Big moving dangerous mechanical stuff? Just a question of time till somebody ends up badly. People do stupid irresponsible shit all the time, internet is full of that.

Fair points, and I'm not saying it's 100% the woman's fault. But to be clear: the big pig is not designed for you to go near it. The woman had to climb through the channel where periodically a ton of water comes through, and pretty much shimmy under the rebar to get to it. But that said, obviously another few pieces of rebar could have prevented the incident.

Here's video of the big pig in action. I think I overstated, maybe it's a hundred-ish gallons of water, rather than hundreds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDac5uSxLlg

> Tokyo Disneyland also has beautiful integrated water features that were totally incomprehensible to my American litigious-society self. Wait, there’s no railing here? How is this even possible?!

Americans need to be conscious of this when venturing into the wider world. We hosted an American colleague, Vince, here in NZ. One weekend he and his wife visited a local wildlife park.

They walked around the perimeter, and came across an apparent hole in the chain link fencing.

He recounted "through the hole, I could see a lion just sitting there. It looked like it could have leaped through the hole and eaten us. Of course, I knew it couldn't, or that park would have been sued into oblivion. But I couldn't figure out how they were making it safe".

Travel advisory for US people - don't assume that other countries operate the same way as the US and instead assume it's entirely possible you will be eaten by a lion (or fall into a stream as in this story).

Kiwis keep lions loose?

No, though as a country we're still heavily skewed towards the"adventure" end of the adventure tourism scale, and you can only sue operators for the most egregious violations. (Not that visiting a wildlife park should be considered adventure tourism). For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island...

The story is confusing to Americans because the concept that is depicted as shockingly different to us as a population is actually not.

The lion attraction down the street from me also features a ditch as a barrier between humans and lions. Vince would have been just as surprised if he had encountered it here first!

In this case there was no ditch, merely a poorly maintained and hardly lion-resistant fence but interesting point!

I see now that the "this story" you were referring to was the Tokyo Disneyland one, but now I am confused about why you answered in the negative and without explanation to the obvious followup question about your lions. Are they free to move between that fence or not?

Aha. Poor writing for sure on my part.

Specifically (from Vince's account) there was no ditch or anything separating the lion from the visitors - just a chain link fence, alongside a hedge. Looking through the hedge, Vince and his wife could see a ragged hole in the fence, not a big opening but the result of some unrepaired damage, and in theory big enough for the lion to jump through, though perhaps it would have to leap up in the air a bit to achieve it.

The fence was certainly there to constrain the lions, but in the true "she'll be right" kiwi modus operandi, the maintenance crew had either not seen the hole, not repaired it, or perhaps decided to leave it due to the presence of the hedge, which acted also as a partial barrier.

Here, suing people is not really a thing for physical accidents, as we have an organisation called the accident compensation Commission (ACC) which acts as a state run insurer in case of accidents to NZ -ers or even visitors. So you don't need to worry if someone slips and breaks their leg on your poorly maintained pathway, because ACC will step in and make the victim whole (in theory of course - this is a government department after all), shielding you from legal liability.

That's except in some other circumstances, such as health and safety violations, which these days (the events I am writing about were many years ago) would most likely ensnare the reckless wildlife park operators, in the same way the various tourism operators involved in the recent white island eruption tragedy are currently before the courts for (alleged) h&s violations.

What I was trying to convey was that assuming a situation must be safe, because otherwise someone would get sued, is not a wise strategy here.

Sorry for the confusion! Should have been clearer.

Idk... maybe NZ just has shoddy fencing culture.

Bad fences, worse vowels. Nice tea ladies, and good grass. Difficult place names. Easy adventuring. Mostly harmless.

I'm not understanding the cultural nuance. Can the lions leave?

I'm starting to think NZ just doesn't understand lions, fences or something. Are we all talking about the same cat?

I think the point is the train of thought "There's a hole in the fence, so the lion could get us, but that can't be right or they would've been sued, or the fear of being sued would make them notice and fix it. So we must still be safe." A rejection of reality based on a different worldview.

It brought to mind the story about the two economists who see $100 on the ground. One wants to pick it up, but the other tells him not to waste his time, because if it were real someone would have picked it up already.

I'm with you on economists.

...not following all the way to lions. The list of reasons for a lion's fence to be high & strong enough to hold a lion, presumably, has more than just "lawyers" on it.

Kiwis are strange though, who knows. Maybe reduced liability reflects in large carnivore caging more directly than in places with cultural aversions to getting eaten.

Another way of putting this is that Americans' over-litigious society ruins things in America (except, of course, bicycling, which we somehow universally concluded can and should remain deadly to all).

Not everything needs 47 railings. Somehow the other 96% of human beings manages without sippy cups.

Moderation seems to be a problem. I prefer sippy cups to limb maiming traps though.

The playground next to be had a swing that was made for wheel chairs. So it was solid and had a ramp. The ramp was like a guillotine if you would get stuck under. Thank fully it was removed, but still it was there for like a year. Hopefully not removed due some accident.

It is good to remember that the bureaucrat approving that swing probably still is around and that he is coming for you.

Safety optimists are the worst. It probably comes down to lack of empathy.

For the record I have nothing against "dangerous" playground things. Just not stupid dangerous.

Assuming competence on the behalf of the park could have been his last mistake I guess.

When I see something that looks strange, I assume it is going to fall apart any second and that an idiot built it. That have saved me a lot of trouble in construction work.

The scary fence is a fence that looks safe but isn't. Like if the lions leans against it, it falls through, or something.

The grass example is also a nice demonstration of how the conventions differ around the world. In some countries it is taken for granted that one can sit or lie down on any lawn in a public area. In others, they are carefully manicured and surrounded by fences and inscriptions trying to dissuade people from doing the obvious thing everyone wants to!

The tragedy of the commons is as pervasive as it is overlooked.

Endemic rule breaking may be "tragic" but in environments that are designed, it is clear honest feedback.

Beautiful patches of grass must have some value to weary passerby's eyes.

But surely the grass would be more beautiful AND comforting to that demographic if it included some interesting looking sittable rocks.

Entirely correct. I'm from Western Europe, and almost everything (or at least a great lot) that is humanly accessible is meant to be used by humans, including grass. Note that this is not in opposition to "carefully manicured", as there is plenty of lawn (for example) which is carefully tended to, but still publicly accessible.

It's also totally natural to sit on art, if it's convenient for sitting, even if it's many centuries old.

A decade ago I moved to California, and it's a very stark contrast there. There is so much greenery and similar that is just "off limits" and made for just looking at it.

Generally, in California things feel much more "fenced off", even without any actual fences.

Similarly, I will never understand Central Park in New York City. I was there a couple years ago and the vast majority of the grass is not meant to be walked on. Most of the paths have a little mini fences surrounding them and there’s tons of signage saying not to walk on the grass. There’s exceptions here and there throughout park park, but generally it’s a park where you’re not allowed on the green spaces, which is just absurd to me. I’ll take the openness of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco over the travesty that is NYC Central Park any day. But of course Salesforce “Park” in San Francisco is similar, you’re not allowed off the paths other than certain small approved lawn areas, and the security has yelled at me about it multiple times. So much for a public park.

In the botanic gardens in Sydney they actually put up signs "yes you are allowed to get on the grass" because I assume many tourists assumed you are not allowed to (in probably tried to tell other people off).

GGP is 30% more area for a fraction of the population. Open grass in Manhattan would get absolutely destroyed in days.

It's not purely population though. My neighbourhood has a desire path, where the grass has been killed off my people walking through it. The traffic is a few people an hour, mostly kids.

However, one of the main parks has similar areas where you get 10s to 100s of people an hour, or people covering it up for extended periods of time for picnics, etc. If population was all that mattered, the park would be barren and the path would be lush, rather than the other way around

it makes sense though. too many people walk on the grass and suddenly there is no more grass, just dirt, especially if the ground is soft

but how do other places handle this? I see plenty of parks where grass is accessible and not entirely gone (granted, a lot of those places don't have the most lush grass, but they have grass!). Is it just constant replanting?

In my experience, grass is only threatened if you have a lot of people in a very short time. Think concert or festival. Granted, NY/Manhattan has many more people than SF, but I don’t know if Central Park is that popular to reach those conditions? Golden Gate Park seems to cope fine indeed.

We have The Domain in Sydney which hosts events and concerts too, so large crowds also are fine to some degree. I assume water and sun and fertiliser go a long way. But I've seen in other areas (and probably The Domain but I rarely go) they will put up temporary construction fences for regeneration when it needs a break and starts to show dirt.

> Similarly, I will never understand Central Park in New York City. I was there a couple years ago and the vast majority of the grass is not meant to be walked on.

That is simply not true.

Perhaps it was a temporary thing? I was there in July of 2021 and there were these little half-height fences surrounding many of the paths and signs saying to stay off the grass. Could have been a temporary restoration thing, or some sort of covid weirdness, no idea. Or maybe my memory is wrong.

NYC resident here, this is simply not true. Yeah of course there are gardens and bushes that are fenced off but most of the grass and dirt you can walk and lie on if you wish.

western? i’ve seen the police remove people from the grass next to the eiffel tower

Someone else here said that it is custom for Parisians to lay on any available patch of grass (like I know from other Western European cities). So it’s okay to assume that that particular patch, along with Disney Land in the article, are exceptions to that rule.

Another example from Europe that I've just seen: in Vienna's Shoenbrunn Palace[1], pretty much all grass in the gardens is off limit (but most grass in the public parks in the city is open). I suppose that makes sense because that garden is specifically made to look splendid, not for people to picnic on, and given the huge number of tourists coming all the time, allowing people to walk on that grass would quickly turn it into mud.

[1] https://www.schoenbrunn.at/

It is a performance art of NIMBY-ism.

Condense 24 hour cycle for homeless people into a 3 minute show.

Tove Jansson in the 50s wrote her Moomin characters to burn "keep off the grass" signs and park keepers were definitely "the authority" to be subverted

I feel like this is a lesson everyone needs to know and few people do. I learnt it from The Design of Everyday Things (great book).

Kind of feels like the author didn't quite get it still. Like he's realised why people sit on the throne thing but he hasn't realised that the solution is to put benches nearby! Or better yet - turn it into a thing that you can sit on.

Every engineer especially should read this book. It's one of the few books I recommend universally. A decent summary of the book was submitted here a year ago with a bunch of discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135115

In the book I learned if it's a flat surface, someone will put something on it.

This article adds to that lesson, if it's a sit-able surface, someone will sit on it. Not just sit, someone will set foot on it, lean against it or interact with it in whatever way.

I worked in a modern art museum as security. I had someone ask me is it was art or a bench. "Just a bench". There were some random wood art in the floor of that room.

In one exhibit there was an art teeter-totter, that had a prominent sign on a post not to sit. This sign was noticed by the woman who placed her toddler on one side before I interjected with an "excuse me". She turned beet red. We all want to...

That job was boring but had its moments.

I've done this; the security lady aggressively shouted at me and frantically pointed at a small sign on the other side of the exhibit. Since some exhibits were "please DO touch" interactive I thought it wasn't that bad of a mistake but she disagreed. I'm guessing she responded to strongly because I was far from the first person to make this mistake, which is a good indication that your design sucks...

"You must be this tall and clairvoyant to enter".

Still not as bad as the traffic controller who physically assaulted me because I failed to see the "stop sign" given in the car lane on the other end of the road from my bicycle in the bicycle lane... Ran up to me and pushed me off my bike shouting "PEOPLE HAVE BEEN IGNORING THIS ALL NIGHT AND I'M SICK OF IT!" ... yeah, because what you're doing makes no sense mate...

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a bench built by George Nakashima that guests cans sit on. Its one of my favorite things at MFA.

https://www.mfa.org/article/2020/bench-with-back

I have a friend who works security at an art museum. He gets asked the same question about some benches. He likes to respond with "I won't answer whether it's art or not, but I'll say you are allowed to sit on it."

There's a gold toilet installation somewhere you have to book to use

Hah, I remember seeing that at the Guggenheim. You could actually use it, if you were willing to wait in line. If I remember correctly I was following a nice tour at the time focused, appropriately enough, on sculpture, so our little group just peeked in on the toilet when it was between active users.

The piece was by Maurizio Cattelan and called “America”. Cattelan is just absolutely hilarious; he also did stuff like putting a face-down Pinnochio into the fountain at the bottom of the Guggenheim lobby, making it look like he had jumped from one of the balconies—the visual was incredible :P

Not anymore, it was stolen.

> It almost seems like there's a real job here for the right type of person. "Real World Engineer"?

Yeah, that'd be nice. For example, several of years ago all of the bus stops around have been replaced by a unified design: three glass walls and a barrel roof made from orange plastic on top. But there is no bench to sit on inside, the roof is made from half-transparent plastic so it provides almost no shade in summer (and walls are fully transparent glass), and also the roof is lifted up just high enough from the walls that the rain would pour inside if there is any wind at all. But they look prettier than older bus stops which is something, I guess.

I am pretty willing to bet that whatever people who designed and approved that design don't actually use public transport.

It's not designed for people... it's designed to keep homeless people away.

As a Latin American living in North America, I find the obsession with extreme safety (including the fear of lawsuits) exhausting.

Fire codes are one:

I can't put a nice welcome mat in front of my door, because someone might trip on it during an evacuation.

Firetruck sirens are physically painful and always turned on.

Monthly alarm testing, again with physically painful volumes that I can't adjust.

My condo windows only open up to a length about 3/4 the width of an adult head.

Somehow, the rest of the world (outside the anglosphere) lives just fine without all of this.

The rest of the world puts more of the burden of individual safety on the individual themselves - for every new situation, we learn to judge safety for ourselves. In the article, the water section in Disneyland Japan is an instance of this.

Every now and then we hear of tourists from highly safety regulated countries getting in trouble for reckless behavior, as if they hadn't had the opportunity to develop that skill. The unfortunate situation with the tourist in North Korea comes to mind.

Topical: A scene from Hogfather https://geekxgirls.com/images/christmas/sword-safe-discworld...

In Paris it is customary that people lie on the grass that is available in patches all over the city and grown for that purpose.

So if you make a smooth patch of grass in your Disneyland Paris you invite everybody to assume resting position.

Fire codes show emergent design as well. The end-of-day fireworks in Disney Paris has the square packed corner to corner, while in the US there are roped off escape routes on the roads.

Reminds me of the Len Lye sculpture broken by someone climbing it then hanging off the spinner. I get someone sitting on a thing that looks like a seat, but that seemed way out of the range of things you could reasonably expect to cater for

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/wellingtons-water-whirler-snap...

I have no idea what that first thing is supposed to be if not some weird kind of throne.

Same here. It's so inscrutable, I'd also assume it was just a weird-looking bench. It honestly looks goofy chained-off, like some kind of modern art installation.

In grad school we got to visit a children’s museum and learn about how they designed the exhibits. One of my favorite takeaways was that almost everything that’s reasonably possible for a child to touch/reach/climb is fair game. Consequently the constraints feel very natural, more like how you would learn from playing in your own backyard/neighborhood park.

Brought to mind the Brooklyn Bridge Park playground feature that had the unfortunate side effect of burning children who mounted it on hot days:

https://www.brooklynpaper.com/breaking-brooklyn-bridge-parks...

This is a great post, showing the unintended consequences of design.

I have found that I can almost never accurately predict how my interfaces will be actually perceived and used.

I try to make things flexible, as I'll almost certainly need to make changes.

> Give me playgrounds!

Let the inner child off its' leash! Be free. It is a theme park, a place to have fun.

I feel like there are parallels to computer security. A lot of my experience in this domain is looking at systems that were designed in a thoughtful way, but the designer didn’t fully appreciate being surrounded by a universe (especially one full of people of varying mixes of deviousness and cleverness).

The “real world engineer” job exists, it’s a security engineer. And it’s equal parts awesome and draining.

Reminded of a quote I like, from a 2013 article about NYC's (then new) bike share:

>But even as the bike-sharing stations remain a source of dismay to some residents, they have served to illustrate a well-worn maxim of urban planning: If you build something, New Yorkers will find a way to lean on it.

Matt Flegenheimer, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/nyregion/bike-sharing-doc...

> Tokyo Disneyland also has beautiful integrated water features that were totally incomprehensible to my American litigious-society self. Wait, there’s no railing here? How is this even possible?! I never would have imagined this was something you could do in a theme park.

Because of the ADA, which is a damn good law, one of the very few things America gets right that the European democracies have not caught up with yet.

I do not think water features are mutually exclusive with accessability.

When they have a walking stones over them they are. The picture from TFA literally shows people jumping from stone to stone, with path and benches on EITHER side, and near as I can tell from the photo there is no obvious bypass.

This is the photo: https://i0.wp.com/cabel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/tokyo...

I don't really see any way that wouldn't be an ADA violation.

> near as I can tell from the photo there is no obvious bypass. reply

Perhaps across the bridge the photographer is standing on .. ?

Can't see that? Nor can I.

Point being it's such a tight shot there could be any number of alternative routes, jumping across the stones needn't be the only path.

I am 99% certain there is a walkway there. There are plenty of absolutely inaccessible places in the Tokyo metropolitan area, but Tokyo Disneyland has a pretty flat/maintained walkway to give access to the whole park as the primary way of moving around IIRC

Building all public spaces for the least common denominator turns all of society into Harrison Bergeron.

Nonsense.

Wheelchair access from the get go and such niceties doesn't lead to ad absurdum leg breaking of the able.

> Because of the ADA, which is a damn good law, one of the very few things America gets right that the European democracies have not caught up with yet.

I'm not getting the logic here. So because a small number of people can't benefit from a fun jumping walkway the 95% don't get to benefit either?

That seems incredibly spiteful.

Tokyo is not in Europe so I am not sure why you're talking about Europe here :D. Anyway, do you seriously think that the path across the water is the ONLY way to cross that or you're just being intentionally silly??

In literature, this concept can be seen in works like "Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling, where the magical world of wizards and witches exists alongside the ordinary world of non-magical "Muggles." The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis is another example, where children from the real world find themselves in the enchanted land of Narnia.

This is what Burning Man art development is like.

If it's possible to climb on it, they will climb on it.

If they climb on it, they will try to have sex on it.

I do woodworking and make furniture and cabinets on the side. Every time I design a piece, the first thing I ask is “what if some kid…”

The end result is that I take a bit more time figuring out some structural reinforcement I can use to ensure safety. It’s a good thing, but definitely tricky to implement at times while keeping designs unique and interesting.

I've been getting into parkour recently (as in, watching videos of it, not actually participating myself), and it does make me look at urban design and street furniture with a new eye. (The people who actually do it have that effect tenfold, of course.)

They should make a theme park of objects that you're not allowed to climb but which you then still can climb because it's not enforced.

Reads more like 'fake it till you make it'

> If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it. Etc.

Reminds me of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Here is a report from 2005, but the situation does not seem to have change a lot since: https://www.dw.com/en/play-time-at-the-holocaust-memorial/a-...

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