Benefits of Inconvenience (“Fuben-Eki”) | Hacker News Reader

Benefits of Inconvenience (“Fuben-Eki”)

www3.nhk.or.jp

44 pointsjfil16 comments

TLDW examples: Sharpen your work pencil as a knife for enjoyment; Look up words in a paper dictionary so you can be accidentally exposed to nearby words; Use a bamboo ruler with only prime-numbered amounts marked; A navigation-app that gradually fades out road-names for places you travel so that you have to learn the names; ... Trashcan robots that wobble piteously near trash they can't collect in order to encourage kids to help; Kindergarden with uneven sandy schoolyard so kids learn coordination; Spigots that are made to splash you if you twist the knob too much;

> Look up words in a paper dictionary so you can be accidentally exposed to nearby words;

I've had this debate many times at work - someone is chastised for spending time troubleshooting an issue vs just restarting everything, but the same people chastising later complain that issues which cant be fixed by a restart take too long to resolve, not understanding that troubleshooting previous issues speeds debugging of future issues.

I'm one of those folks who ends up erring on the "deeper than needed" dives when there's some question or prod-bug, and I'd like to emphasize that writing up what you found is crucial getting the most benefit from the little detours.

At a minimum, that means in such a way that when I think "Oh, I saw this before" I can find it, but ideally it's in such a way that someone else getting the same log-messages or whatever can find it too, and even better if it's a ticket in the backlog.

Obviously not ever deep-dive will be productive in the end, but it's hard to know which-is-which until you've finished the diagnosis... and maybe another few months have passed too.

Reminds me of that Kurt Vonnegut quote that has recently become viral. Why buy 100 envelops when you can buy one at a time and go on a tiny neighborhood adventure each time you need to buy a single envelop. You'll see dogs, trees, neighbors, and have tiny conversations with yourself that lead to new insights.

Well done interview! I like the idea Professor Kawakami Hiroshi shared to make inconvenient design ideas as design principles.

His inconvenient design cards reminded me of the IDEO Method Cards (https://www.ideo.com/post/method-cards , IDEO is a design company).

I will now look at some of the DESIGN TALKS plus series :)

What American anime nerds think Japanese TV is like: Evangelion

What Japanese TV is really like: NHK on the benefits of inconvenience

What American hackernews nerds think Japanese TV is like: NHK on the benefits of inconvenience

What Japanese TV is really like: News, weather, sports, variety shows, crime drama, period drama, standup/skit comedy, Sunday morning kid's shows/anime, late night anime...but that would be too normal to post about.

I don't think it's fair to act like navel-gazing NHK documentaries aren't a thing though. You can watch them at any time just by turning on channel 2

just like bbc (blue planet, Panorama, Louis Theroux) or pbs or any other public media thingymabobby right?

Honestly idk what it is that makes public media like that but im glad it exists. Maybe its harder to pitch this kind of project to profit hungry execs

But if anyone asks, I don’t own a TV and I don’t speak Japanese, sorry, goodbye.

Hah - every time I've been in japan its always talk shows where people are eating food with ridiculously over done expressions of how amazing and tasty it is.

Is this what all the UX designers have been watching?

The website certainly goes all in on the new approach.

i've thought of this more often in terms of putting natural brakes on otherwise problematic activities that are too hard to control other ways At low levels the friction doesn't matter, but when the undesirable activity gets out of hand it slows it down. Think eg: sending spam, or in a completely different domain, authorities abusing power to search people's possessions, track people everywhere etc. Of course all these examples are on my mind because it is the natural brakes on them that are falling away with technology and hence we have to suddenly question if there needs to be an artificial brake. Which then seems highly counter-intuitive to the people involved - police go crazy when confronted with process designed to deliberately slow them down and effectively waste their time from doing what they think is just their jobs.

If nobody can use it, nobody can abuse it!

No text 8-( Watching a video is just too fuben...

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