THE FINER points of Saudi Arabian jurisprudence had an immediate attraction one day last week. A brat broke into my car and knocked off the stereo.
Slicing off a couple of hands in Garema Place every Friday would do the trick, I thought with middle-class anger. It took at least half a day for the Saudi approach to be replaced with the boring old politically correct notion of giving the recession-deprived urchin just one more final chance with magisterial wag of the finger and yet another bond.
Anyway, this column is not about jurisprudence this week, but design: good and bad.
The bad design was the old car stereo. The new one, however, has a panel on the front about the size of cheque book, which clips off. The panel, with all the essential controls, can be put in your pocket or brief case or taken into the house, leaving the bemused brat with just a blank plastic panel to ponder. Brilliant.
The reason the brat got into the car in the first place is because a panel beater had left the car’s rear gate unlocked. A week previously, I stopped to allow an ambulance to pass and the car behind touched the back of my car. Just a couple of lights and a crooked bumper bar seemed the sum of it.
Tell that to the panel-beater. He looked at the car and jotted down a few letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then went back inside his office. This was not your average 1980s panel-beater. This is the ’90s. His offices could have been a medical-specialist’s waiting room, only cleaner. All the grubby grease and mechanical bits were safely out-of-sight.
He passed his hieroglyphics to a young woman behind a computer screen who tapped a few things on the keyboard. In moments out came a piece of paper from the printer.
It listed every part and broke down the labour cost in fitting them.
But some things never change. The horror was still the bottom line: $916.58. Astounding: $916.58 for a couple of plastic lights.
“”Can’t do anything about it, mate,” he said. “”They’re designed like it. You have to replace the whole thing. One knock and you’re up for 200 bucks.”
Very clever design that, if you are in the spare-parts business. Of course, the car design is at fault. Why do we put lights in the most vulnerable part of the car? Car designers can build cars to take a 15km/h bump without doing a thousand bucks damage. It’s child’s play. You see it at the Canberra Show in the bumper-car pit. You see it with some model Volvos, but nowhere else. Apparently, drivers are eternal optimists in the face of contrary experience and believe they will never hit or get hit and don’t engage in consumer-led demands for better design.
Will the $916.58 go into GDP, I wondered. Will it contribute to economic growth? Perhaps that is part of the design. Repairing things at inflated costs contributes to economic growth, the yardstick for whether living standards are rising.
Don’t despair, however. The computer program that produced the quote, called Auto-Quote is ingenious. It lists all the parts and their prices and updates it instantaneously and tells what parts are available. No phone calls and farnarkling to see if the parts are in; it’s all done on the computer by one young woman, leaving other people to get on with more productive things. Of greater importance, the car was fixed when they said it would be and it cost precisely what they said it would: $916.58. That’s good design.
Speaking of design, the reason I was in Fyshwick in the first place was to pick up a gadget called a Sola-Tube. Despite the ignorant spelling, this is a design gem. It makes redundant the conventional coffee-table-sized skylight.
The Sola-Tube is a 30cm diameter shaft with a highly reflective internal lining, like Alfoil. You cut a 30cm circle in the ceiling and take just one tile off the roof and put the shaft between them. The old tile is replaced with a clear perspex dome which sits just above the roof line. Inside the dome is a semi-circular reflector, which faces north. It catches the light and sends it down the reflective shaft. The hole in ceiling is covered with a clear-plastic diffuser.
The result is stunning. It brightened up a dingy kitchen corner, like having a light on. Because the shaft is only 25cm wide, you don’t lose heat like a traditional skylight. And it’s cheaper. Great design. Don’t ring me for more details. Look it up in the phone book.
Meantime, if we can get the sort of de-Bonoesque brainpower behind the car-stereo panel and the Sola-Tube to stop brats from stealing, without invoking the rigours of Saudi jurisprudence…