"If you design a car, someone will use it to rob a bank," one of our design professors used to say. His point was that you can't worry about how people might misuse a product you design.
It's possible a UK charitable organization doesn't share his point of view; they are allegedly sponsoring an experimental program to pad lightposts so that text-messaging pedestrians who walk into them don't hurt themselves. We're hoping that this is a gag--though the original source attributed the program to the London branch of Living Streets, nothing on their website corroborates this.
This may remind you of the news from a year ago, when a few NYC pedestrians were hit by cars because they were too busy engaging their iPods and yapping on cell phones. Senator Kruger (NY's other Senator, remember him?) proposed a crosswalk ban on the devices, which thankfully came to naught.
And according to the FBI, bank robberies increased 4% from 2005 to 2006, the last years for which statistics are available. Perhaps we'll see more padded lightposts in the future.
译文:
滥用产品，这怪谁呢？
“如果你设计出一辆车，总有人开着它去抢劫银行。”我们的一个设计师曾经这样说。他觉得既然无法预知人们会怎样误用你设计的产品，你就不用去担心，并且无法操心。
英国的一个慈善组织可不买他的账，他们称他们正在赞助一个实验性的项目，而这个项目是给路灯包上塑料衬垫，所以那些光顾着走路发短信而撞到灯柱的人们就不会叫疼啦。然而，我们认为这只是个为了堵住人们的嘴的幌子——虽然
项目发起人把这个项目放在了
Living Streets这个网站的伦敦板块上，可是他们自己的网站却没有证实这则消息。
这也许让你想起了
一年前的那些新闻，一群纽约路人在沉迷于他们ipod播放的歌曲和对着手机唠唠叨叨的时候被车撞了。克鲁格议员（纽约的另一个参议员，还记得他吗？）提出了一个行人在穿越马路时不许使用这些手机阿，音乐播放器阿的设备的禁令，但最后这个计划泡汤了。
还有根联邦局的调查显示，银行抢劫者的数量在
2005至
2006年上升了4%，这是过去几年统计的数据了。或许我们在未来能看到更多的塑料衬垫灯柱吧。