Designed by psychiatrists?
I've been away in London for a few days, speaking at an international electronic medical records conference. The venue is a little strange: the New Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms that reminds one of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Added to this is a weird system of signage, where all directions are represented by triangles - symbols that as we all know have 3 points and therefore point in three directions. Most of these triangles were positioned next to staircases and escalators. It took most of us four days to figure out how to get to the conference rooms each day.

This did not pass unnoticed. At lunch yesterday, I sat between a US physician-cum-computer-boffin, to my left, and a British consultant psychiatrist, to my right. "Tell me, who do you think designed this place?" said the US physician to the psychiatrist. "Could it have been a psychiatrist?" The psychiatrist laughed. "No idea, but one thing does seem strange: how could anyone have chosen triangles to indicate directions?" he said. Everyone concurred, including the woman from FirstDataBank, opposite.

I'd say that although most people know little of the ideas of usability or cognitive ergonomics, they are very clear about how unusable so many things are in our daily lives.