I rode in a Smart car for the first time last week. At first I felt silly and it didn’t help that other drivers sometimes drove past us grinning with amusement. Clowns in a clown car stopped being funny fifty years ago. Now a guy in a Smart car is.On day two something totally unexpected happened: I forgot we were in a Smart car. Rather than some weird novelty, it seemed perfectly normal. The cabin was spacious. The car rode well.
Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.
Had I asked other drivers why their cars were so large they mostly likely would shrug. Isn’t this the size cars had to be?
Which is why I admire the Smart car — because it calls into question what is completely normal and suggest that it might be absurd. The world is full of normal absurdities.
The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.
So was bus tracking when we founded TransLoc. Back then, bus tracking meant a dot hopping around on a map every minute. It seemed quite normal to everyone. But we wondered: why depict moving buses with stationary dots that hardly move?
When we made the dots move people were amazed. “You can see the buses moving!” they exclaimed. Yet the paralyzing power of normal didn’t end there. Our ideas actually made some people afraid. Bus tracking was still largely considered secret intelligence for administrators only. “You mean you want to let our riders see where the buses are all the time?” It sounded dangerous.
Now, organizational transparency and real-time data are in vogue. One day, hopefully, local food andtinyright-sized cars will be too.
Erst wenn der letzte Programmierer eingesperrt und die letzte Idee patentiert ist, werdet ihr merken, dass Anwälte nicht programmieren können.