原创 Are we bound by constraints of yesteryear?

As part of my ongoing Pedagogical and Phantasmagorical Inamorata Prognostication Engine project (try saying that 10 times quickly), I'm working with Jason Dueck from Instrument Meter Specialties to create a suite of new faceplates for my antique analogue meters.

I showed an early version of one of these meters in my recent column. This meter reflects the number of days until the next full moon.

Yes, I know this meter spans 32 days. Yes, I also know that it would be more common for the full moon to be presented in the center of the dial. The reasoning behind these (and other) decisions will be made clear in a future article. For the moment, I want to focus on the fact that --in this incarnation -- the negative values on the left-hand portion of the dial ("-24D," "-16D," and "-8D") are adorned with negative signs, while the positive "8D" value to the right is presented without an accompanying "+" symbol.

Now, I can understand that if all of the values on a meter are positive, there is no need to include "+" symbols everywhere, but what about a meter that is being used to display a mixture of negative and positive values?

Well, it turns out that, in the past, if you had a center-zero meter that displayed some quantity ranging from say -10 to 0 to +10, for example, then it was very common to omit the '+' symbols on the positive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 values.

In many cases, in fact, meter manufacturers also omitted the '-' symbols on the negative values, so the faceplate would read 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. This was done on the basis that it was generally understood that negative values would be presented on the left, while positive values would be presented on the right.

To my eye, this form of display has a somewhat stark and overly minimalist quality about it. Personally, I prefer to festoon '-' and '+' symbols all over the place like confetti so as to ensure there is no ambiguity whatsoever as to what is being displayed. Apart from anything else, it seems to me that a pert little '+' symbol nicely counterbalances its '-' cousin. So, why did the designers of yesteryear omit '+' symbols (and sometimes their '-' counterparts) from their analogue meter faceplate creations? Well, Jason explained it thusly:

Many of these techniques actually came from letter conservation. Way-back-when, most of the meter shops used rub-on lettering. Using only using minus symbols -- or only one minus and one plus -- meant saving time and characters on your transfer sheets.

Hmm, this does make sense. If one is applying individual characters by hand, I can understand the desire to use as few characters as possible, not the least that fewer characters equates to fewer cock-ups.

These days, of course, we are used to having access to high-speed, high-resolution printers coupled with software programs that aid in laying everything out "just so." The days of meter manufacturers using rub-on lettering have long gone, and we are no longer constrained by their limitations, so why do some manufacturers continue to omit '+' symbols? Is it just a matter of taste, or is it a case of "We've always done it this way?"

In turn, this led me to ponder whether there are other instances of the way in which we design things today being bound by constraints of yesteryear that are no longer of any consequence. Can you think of any such cases?