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The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

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Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#21

Post by Lio »

stymaar wrote: post #20
Lio wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vintage nuclear plants are also infamously used as the canonical examples of bad UI in teaching. To paraphrase, the Three Mile Island Disaster happened because the operators couldn't discern the right red light in a sea of other lights and noise. https://uxdesign.cc/three-mile-island-how-bad-ux-led-to-a-nu...

The lessons of TMI have been learned though, the accident has been thoroughly investigated and that's the reason why it's now being discussed in class.

Of course but we're talking about vintage control room designs here, some of which predate that investigation, so it still seems relevant to point out.

Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#23

Post by mrweasel »

mysecretaccount wrote: post #7
stymaar wrote: post #3

It's not specific to the Soviet world, any control room built before computers looks like that. The examples I'm familiar with is nuclear power plants from the 70s: - here's Bugey, the oldest active nuclear plant in France: https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/5A6732BE-29F9-43FA-806... - And here's Dampierre, the second oldest, which I was lucky enough to visit: https://www.larep.fr/photoSRC/Gw--/centrale-nucleaire-…

There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.

Well, how about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant#/med...

This is from Swedens Ågesta Nuclear Plant, the first in the country.

I don't really get why you'd need all the used floor space. That seems to really be the key difference from those early control rooms and more modern ones. The old ones had you walking around and the new ones are designed to keep you seated. Still, it seems like the old ones had an excessive amount of floor space.

Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#24

Post by wwind123 »

stymaar wrote: post #17
Monotoko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals. Nuclear plants, planes, etc use colour so you can differentiate very quickly under pressure. Much easier to shout "THE RED BUTTON!!!" than "The second button five down from the left!"

Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that. Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it wi…

A few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never a need to raise voice.

Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#27

Post by varjag »

mrweasel wrote: post #23
mysecretaccount wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.

Well, how about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant#/med... This is from Swedens Ågesta Nuclear Plant, the first in the country. I don't really get why you'd need all the used floor space. That seems to really be the key difference from those early control rooms and more modern ones. The old ones had you walking around and the new ones are designed to keep you seated. Still, it seems lik…

Heat dissipation and gracious distances for installation and servicing.

Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#28

Post by barrkel »

I think these control rooms were superior in some respects to modern software system observability.

- modelling the system rather than implementation (system status rather than many individual service statuses)

- supporting causal reasoning: the control flow on top means you can trace failure modes back, visually; software systems typically only model their own ontology, and you need to look somewhere else for the next abstraction down

- surface state first rather than time series; a pretty graph is nice to look at, but for actionability sometimes what you need is the flashing red light

- prioritize first-out indicator. In a complex system with lots of alerts, the most important diagnostic alert is often the first one - the rest are downstream and contribute to alert fatigue, despite them probably being more important business metrics

Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

#30

Post by viciousvoxel »

wwind123 wrote: post #24
stymaar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that. Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it wi…

A few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never…

There's a big difference between the (controlled) chaos of an ER vs scheduled surgery, but it's still dramatized for TV obviously.
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