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An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

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Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#21

Post by js2 »

The plane’s speed slowed to dangerous levels, activating the stall alarm—the one, in the words of Popular Mechanics, “designed to be impossible to ignore.” It blared the word “Stall!” 75 times. Everyone present ignored it.

Probably not:

In an article in Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche noted that once the angle of attack was so extreme, the system rejected the data as invalid and temporarily stopped the stall warnings. However, "this led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up" which increased the angle of attack and thus prevented the plane from getting out of its stall.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#22

Post by ep103 »

raamdev wrote: post #18

I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…

this is... genius

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#23

Post by kctess5 »

raamdev wrote: post #18

I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only…

Maybe it can backfire and you'll subconsciously silence your cell phone during actual calls.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#24

Post by Waterluvian »

dfsegoat wrote: post #2

Along these same lines, one of my favorite examples of this type of work (human factors related to attention/alerting) is "Bitchin' Betty" and company - the female voice that makes up the "oral alert system" from the F/A-18 superhornet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8 A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice so that pilots would know to immediately pay attention to t…

All I can hear is my A-10 Simulator saying, "ALTITUDE, ALTITUDE!" in what seems like a calm female voice, but I can't un-hear it.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#25

Post by empath75 »

sumoboy wrote: post #10

Hospital monitors beeping all the time are so annoying, stressful. Last visit I just turned off the machine I was annoyed.

Yeah, my dad was just in the ICU, and you could never tell if he was dying or if the saline bag was just running low. So stressful to be around.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#28

Post by dmckeon »

A environment of multiple, repeating alarms - whether "Stall!" in a cockpit every 3 seconds, or a hospital room with multiple beeps, with only 8 of 1455 especially significant, sounds to me to be like being a programmer trying to fix a critical problem with a PHB manager hovering at one's shoulder, barking "Another server crashed" and "Have you fixed it yet?" and similar several times a minute.

Perhaps such environments could benefit from a button that silenced all current alarms for at least 30 seconds, leaving the operator a brief quiet time to focus, modulo new alarms.

Asking the annoying manager to go to some mildly distant place to find an appropriate manual or checklist binder (that may even exist!) may work well for some programmers and some managers.

For a more common example, spend a few minutes in the lobby of a busy or understaffed McDonalds and listen to the cacophony of beeps.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#29

Post by a_c_s »

LargeCompanies wrote: post #19

Many years ago I created a social alarm clock idea which was panned and hated.. lol. Though at the time I had no tech skills and never released our prototype. Personally being woken up to something funny, cute, meaningful from a friend or loved one was great. Though the challenge for this idea to work is you have to put restraints via audio volume levels to ensure a great experience (waking up laughing or with a smil…

Interesting idea, partly because it is the total opposite of what I want in an alarm clock: everyone's different!

As a heavy sleeper I'm always groggy and not social when I get up. My perfect alarm clock would have a loud, blaring alarm (imagine what a movie alarm would sound like to indicate nuclear war or some other form of certain doom). I think I'd either be annoyed by or sleep through something cute like laughter.

Re: An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways

#30

Post by CarVac »

amelius wrote: post #27

The most distressing sound I know is the Shepard–Risset glissando, also known as the Barber-pole sound because it seems to continuously drop in frequency. Wikipedia has an audio sample [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

That's pretty good, but I think the Chicago tornado sirens are more hair-raising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE

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