No one wants to make mistakes. But when you have a career in tech or engineering, you really can’t afford to make them. History’s full of them, big and small. Sometimes, they cause a disaster. Other times, they just make a new piece of tech flop. What they all have in common is that someone somewhere didn’t think about the design hard enough. With a good education, like in Centennial College’s Mechanical Engineering Technology- Design program you can avoid making these mistakes in your career.
An airport shut down because there were too many flight plans
As Exo tells it, in 2014, all of the computers at the Los Angeles International Airport crashed, and hundreds of flights were delayed. The reason: A U-2 spy plane was flying through the area without a flight plan, and an air traffic controller had to guess its altitude, causing the computer system try and calculate every possible flight plan (so it wouldn’t crash into any other planes). It turned out to be too many for its memory to handle, and the whole thing shut down. That system cost $2.4 billion to make, by the way. I bet they wish they had some talented engineering designers on it.
The great blackout of 1965
We’ve had a few of these over the years, but one of the biggest power outages in North America happened in 1965 when the systems that were supposed to stop blackouts made one happen. As Technology Review explains, in order to make sure there was always enough power for every region that needed it, New York, New England and Ontario merged their power grids, so if one area needed more power, the other areas could lend it to them. But the designers didn’t think about what would happen if the grid had too much energy, and so, when a single power switch turned off and sent too much power to New York, its generators shut off to avoid getting fried, sending that extra power to the other regions, which also then shut off, until 30 million people didn’t have power.
The time all of the phones went down
Land0line phones are so well-designed, that they can work during blackouts, says Technology Review. But this didn’t happen in 1990, when AT&T, owners of one of the largest and most reliable phone networks, had that network go down across America, after a single switch at one call center had a problem, shut down for a second, and then sent out a signal that made every single other call center shut down. Cell phones weren’t common yet, so the nation ground to a halt, with reports that news reporters couldn’t even call in to check on the story. Before this happened, AT&T was thought of as reliable, made ads about it, and were even cited by the US government for their safety. Flaws like this are supposed to be caught by designers and engineers before going out.
So many smartphones fail because of design problems
Lots of things can cause a smartphone to flop, but one reason is bad tech design, like with the Blackberry Storm. Business Insider says that when touchscreens became the hot new smartphone tool, Blackberry didn’t want to get rid of keyboards. They tried to have it both ways, by making a “clickable” screen on their new model, like a keyboard. But it was a design that didn’t work well, broke often, and had from lag between the touch and the input, something touch screens shouldn’t have. Today, Blackberry doesn’t make phones, and that was part of the reason why.
There was also Nokia’s N-Gage, designed to be both a phone and a game system at once, long before smartphone games were a thing. But it was really expensive (at $299), and, as Tom’s Guide points out, the location of its speakers meant that you had to hold it sideways to talk, making people jokingly compare it to a taco, thanks to its shape. It was also designed so that you had to remove its back cover and take out its battery just to switch games. Some of these ideas were ahead of their time and would be picked up by better designers, but in this case, bad engineering and design killed it. Also, speaking of games…
The video game that hurt your eyes
Before the 3DS, Nintendo tried to make a portable video game console with 3D graphics in 1995. IT was called the Virtual Boy, and it was a VR-like headset that employed real 3D graphics. Tom’s Guide explains that thanks to bad design, it was a pain to use and play. Instead of strapping it to your head, you needed to mount it on a table with a stand. Even worse, the 3D graphics (which would only display in red, by the way) actually caused so much eye strain, you were told to take a break every 15 minutes. It was a flop and was canceled after barely a year. Once again, while it failed, a lot of the ideas that came from it would be used by designers and engineers, later on, to make better tech.
Think you can do better?
With a Centennial College education in Mechanical Engineering Design, you can learn through hands-on practice, class projects and paid co-op work. You’ll work with computer-assisted design (CAD) and other tools of the career. Best of all, if you have prior experience, you can take our Fast-Track version of the program, and graduate faster, getting out into the industry, ready to learn from these mistakes, and design the flawless tech of tomorrow.
Written by: Anthony Geremia