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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)

#31

Post by stymaar »

Lio wrote: post #21
stymaar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK All of them have been retrofitted to take the lessons from TMI into account (I can't be sure about other countries, but in France it's definitely the case).

And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.

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

#32

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

META: Make sure that your adblocker is set to 11 on that site.

In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.

I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.

The photo was removed, in the current version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

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

#34

Post by elzbardico »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #5

Having worked on SCADA software in the past, I find the evolution of the control room UX fascinating. You can see in these pictures, where every input and output is a real physical thing, just how much density of information was required for Operators to process. As we moved to computer screens representing the same, those original screens would represent these control room layouts faithfully (and you can understand…

Basically you had way more people involved in operations. Automation was always sold as labor-saving.

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

#35

Post by elzbardico »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #10

I always wonder when I see a picture of a cockpit of an airplane how many meters there are. Don't know why they need so many, what meters do you need to fly a plane?

Navigation equipment, radios, autopilot, auto-throttle, multiple engines with multiple parameters to be controlled, multiple hydraulic systems, pressurization and environmental controls. Consider that for each jet engine you have different displays for RPMs, temperatures, oil pressure. Things add up fast.

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

#36

Post by j4k0bfr »

barrkel wrote: post #28

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 ne…

These older systems design principles have really scratched a part of my brain and I'm keen to keep pulling that thread. Do you have any recommended readings on the topic?

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

#39

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

avian wrote: post #16

Each time I see beauty in old machinery I think about the recent IEEE article that started with something like "AI designs aren't limited by outdated concepts like simplicity and aesthetics." and remember that there is someone that goes to a museum and sees inefficiences and time wasted on unnecessary detail instead of inspiration.

AI designs will start to look more (biologicaly) evolved, less intentionally designed. Museums, especially older ones are full of jars with pickled specimens, bags of bones and tubes and strings which somehow seemed to fulfil their purpose. Humans will study the objects to find out what makes them work.

You can imagine a scenario where the pervasive use of AI has dumbed down humanity so much that they can only stare at the intricate designs while marveling at the omniscient creator which must have been behind it all.

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

#40

Post by tclancy »

paradoxyl wrote: post #26

Gorgeous pictures, but I dislike the "chef hats" in the first image. It makes them seem less like top-notch scientists and more like short-order cooks.

My reaction was, “This is what I imagined McDonalds University to be when I was a kid.”
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