/ Blog / / Blog /Last week, I read a story about how Waymo (self-driving taxi service) is partnering with Door Dash (food delivery service).
And it surprised me. I was genuinely shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Because when I first read the headline, I thought it must be about putting food in a car and driving it off to the recipient. Which would have been stupid enough. But the reality was much stupider. Waymo is paying Dashers to close the Waymo car doors that passengers leave open.
How has Waymo the technical ability to self-drive a motor vehicle around a city carrying human passengers, but they do not possess the skill to automate closing a door? Did they overlook every method that might encourage the passenger to close it themselves? Was there no other possible method to get the door in a closed state without resorting to a third party that commissions human drivers to drive over to the automated car and do it manually?
Four-door taxis with automated doors are rare outside of Japan, but power-sliding doors have existed on vans for decades. The concept of vehicle doors that can open and close themselves is not futuristic. We know how to do it.
Am I to believe that nowhere in the process of creating the Waymo fleet, this was not considered? No one accounted for the possibility that a passenger might not close a door?
Working in the technology industry over the last 15 years, I can actually believe it. I can believe that such things are overlooked. Because I’ve seen people jump to much wilder implementations before the ones that feel much more obvious to me. I have witnessed people explain how apps “must” do something because there’s no other way. I’ve seen an apathetic attitude take over everything.
Just the other day, someone tried to tell me that companies like Dropbox have no choice but to display a system dialogue asking for access to other devices on my network, because Dropbox built a feature that prioritizes syncing files locally if possible. To make that assumption, you have to neglect the possibility that the app could just ask if that local sync was applicable before asking permission to scan the network for supposed eligible devices.
And I see this happening all over. I don’t expect everyone to think like me. I sincerely hope others are not afflicted with the curse I have where I question everything I encounter. But that’s how designers have to think to figure out the best solutions to problems. If the design industry has moved on from thinking and invested completely into following directions, then I suspect this can still get much worse.
It always seemed to me that devising efficient solutions to problems was the role of a designer, to draw a line from expectation to reality. In other words, to create a method that makes it work.
I think two things broadly happened that contributed to where we are now with regard to this.
Firstly, the move-fast-and-break-things world prioritizes not just the concept of shipping things in imperfect states, but accepting less-than-ideal solutions knowing you can patch them over later. And while that can be true, as Steve Jobs so famously said about hardware buttons on a phone, you can’t add a physical button later; the devices already shipped. There are situations where you can reasonably go back and revise, but there are others where you cannot.
Secondly, the designer’s responsibility shifted a bit. Modern design departments are now more in service of the company rather than its customers. Instead of developing possible solutions to reduce friction, designers follow directives to make the chart go up and to the right.
That’s what happened here, right? Powered doors—just one potential solution—are more expensive.
And to do it now? What’s Waymo going to do? Refit the cars with automated doors? Resell the cars and get new ones that have automated doors? Someone either consciously kicked the can down the road or they were negligent, and it’s costing them a more complex solution and actual money, up to $24 to close a car door in Los Angeles. A solution that necessarily requires a third party.
It is ironic, isn’t it? The premise of Waymo is to automate moving a human being on a road, but in reality, it cannot function without a human being’s intervention. I don’t even want this technology to begin with. I think it’s dangerous and reckless and unethical. But I can’t help but laugh at this “solution” because it reminds me of how scooter companies need to redistribute the scooters around a city when they all end up consolidated in a single spot.
If only they thought of ways to move people collectively instead of the vehicles.