When technology gets in the way of progress

August 9, 2015

Van Walt is a technology based company and we embrace new developments in equipment and techniques but today I learned about Behavioural Design: The Surprising Link between Ecommerce & Video Game Design and that, for me, takes things too far. In fact, it is precisely on this theme that I’m writing this blog today because recently we have seen a move toward adding technology for the sake of it. Here’s an example: I love to listen to classical music and I have a rather good portable player which can accept and reproduce music in a lossless format. My car radio will accept a Bluetooth connection but I also pair a phone to that and occasionally the two interfere with each other and so, I use a good old fashioned cable to connect the two. Easy, cheap, no pairing required, no interference and it takes a second to make the perfect connection.

Where’s this old man going with this you may ask? The answer is that technology can on occasion get in the way of efficient progress. Take the current fashion, for example of using a mobile phone to read field data from water quality sondes or level loggers. The phone is not designed for this: Yes, the screen resolution is better but battery capacity is generally too low, aside from very expensive units standard mobile phones are just not rugged enough for the rigours of regular field use. Compare to that a good “old fashioned” dedicated handset, rugged, IP rated, durable.

So we need to look at the “cost of ownership” of a particular system; in the case of water quality; the electrodes, the efficacy of calibration, the stability of measurements, the robustness of the cable and yes, the quality and field ruggedness of the readout device.

On the face of it a smartphone can perform a dual task but is it really the right tool for the job?

Vincent van Walt