peter walks to the first wagon of the train, which is almost 650m long. he lifts the lid of the operator's panel and pushes the button that opens the wagon roof. he now has to keep the button pressed for two minutes until the roof opens fully. but because peter and his fellow-workers are being paid piecework, he does not want to waste valuable time waiting. he locks the button in place by pushing a toothpick into the narrow gap between the button and the panel, and then walks to the next wagon. he does the same at every wagon. the procedure would certainly not meet with the approval of the safety officer, and is one of the many things that this interaction design project is designed to improve.

CRL wanted to improve the operation of the wagon, and so they asked us to carry out an interaction design project on the new closed double-decker car transport wagon. the advantage of a closed car wagon is that it offers better protection against theft and the environment. the disadvantage is that closed double-decker car wagons [and there are only two types available on the world market] are trickier to operate — a characteristic that could persuade car manufacturers against using this type of wagon. this is why the interaction design of the wagon has to be improved — a job that GP is ideally qualified to undertake.

when we explain to people that GP specialises in industrial design and interaction design, most people have never heard of the latter. when we tell them that one of the unique features of GP is that we can combine both of these disciplines, we are usually met with blank looks. even those who are aware that industrial design aims to create attractive mass-market products like toasters and mobile phones still have no idea what interaction design involves.

interaction design is the discipline dedicated to defining the behavior of products and software. in interaction design we shape the way people deal with an object, normally an application on a computer or a self-service terminal like an atm or we design how to interact with a fax machine, like we did for Sagem.

on this occasion, we were given the opportunity to examine how the 'jockeys' [the people who drive the cars onto the wagon] operate the wagon and were asked to optimise the interaction. we began, as we normally do, by carrying out a thorough analysis. we visited a loading bay, interviewed the jockeys and their managers, observed a loading session and figured out how the jockeys got the job done.

we were surprised to discover that the design of the control panels actually made the jockeys' job of loading all of these high-value cars onto the car wagons more difficult. for example, the jockeys received no feedback as to the position of the platform and the gauges they relied on were all positioned at different heights and used different scales.