“When Albert Salvador, Cupertino’s building official, visited Apple’s new spaceship building last year, he worried that people would walk into the cafeteria’s glass walls because they couldn’t distinguish them from the equally clear automatic doors,” Wendy Lee reports for The San Francisco Chronicle. “After he brought up the issue, a contractor walked straight into the glass. He would not be the last.”
“The Chronicle found at least three incidents in a review of 911 audio and incident reports obtained from Santa Clara County in a public records request,” Lee reports. “Three people suffered head injuries, including a middle-aged man who hit his head so hard against a glass window that he was bleeding on his eyebrow and expected to have stitches, according to 911 audio.”
“Salvador and Dirk Mattern with the Santa Clara County Fire Department said they raised concerns about the glass doors of the cafeteria, a highlight of the spaceship building, during a visit to Apple Park nine months ago. State building code requires that doors be identifiable. They were talking with one contractor when another walked into a glass wall, both men said,” Lee reports. “After Salvador and Mattern brought up the glass issue, Foster and Partners placed black rectangular stickers with rounded corners on the glass panes, Salvador said. The stickers were placed in the cafeteria before Salvador gave his Dec. 30 approval for Apple employees to begin moving into the main building.”
“The stickers were effective in preventing people from running into glass, he said,” Lee reports. “After Jan. 4, there were no other incidents in which emergency services were called to treat people running into the glass.”
Read more in the full article here.
“On January 2nd, 2018, area 911 services fielded two separate calls regarding distracted Apple workers who slammed into glass walls, as well as another two days later,” Tom McKay reports for Gizmodo. “All three of the injured happened to be men. In the second incident, the person in question conked into the wall hard enough that on-site medical personnel deemed he was likely to need stitches.”
Read the 911 transcripts here.
MacDailyNews Take: Black rectangular stickers with rounded corners are nice, but these – of which Apple must have plenty – would be cooler:
SEE ALSO:
Apple Park has one flaw: Employees keep walking face-first into the clear glass panes – February 16, 2018
For Apple, it’s fashion over function.
very freudian disdain, why are you even looking at MDN?
At least Apple addresses both form and function. Most of its competitors in consumer electronics fail on both counts. The closest that they come to success is when they copy Apple. Yep, I said it!
Unfortunately True.
Apple used to understand how to make style and function complement each other and work together. They were great at empowering the user in this way. Now they seem more concerned with controlling and manipulating the user.
For example. I have a 2.5″ SSD. On a windows machine, I could just plug it in internally. On a mac, I have to buy a $250 thunderbolt adaptor, and that still isn’t as fast as the direct ATA connection. Why? So they can make the iMac a millimeter thinner? No, it’s so I have to buy a new machine earlier.
Would sure be a dangerous place for those to walk/text…or “how to make reality disappear in 5 easy taps” 😉
Sounds like a perfect situation for a wide-spread Notch implementation.
Time to call OSHA
if Apple has to deal with them they will fix this problem
Wasn’t this posted about a month ago? A Bloomberg story?
Great opportunity to stress test facial recognition software.
This issue is ancient and Apple had to have known better. I am willing to bet there were conversations about it before the Mothership was finished. That nothing was done indicates that someone in the upper eshilons Of Apple is in love with their clear glass walls design and stopped all practical solutions.
Stickers, stripes, apples or prunes: Just mark the glass! Duh! This should never have been an issue. Never.
Soon after I moved to California, my brother-in-law came to visit and banged his head trying to walk through a closed sliding-glass door. It was too clean, too transparent.
In clear weather the upper windows of my house reflect the sky perfectly and birds regularly thump into one of them and fall to the deck. Some twitch for a while, then manage to fly off. Others lie with broken necks until an opportunistic cat finds them, or until I throw their poor little bodies over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
In evolutionary terms, birds have not had enough time to adapt to the tricks we humans play upon nature. And apparently humans haven’t adapted well to our own tricks, constantly walking into traps we should have seen coming.
I blame Steve Jobs. Would anyone else have okayed the glass staircases in his high-rise Apple stores? I never went to one of them wearing a dress.
And it’s just too easy for the Beagle Boys to break into an Apple store because they’re made of glass. What is the obsession? Are clarity and simplicity the monomaniacal guiding principles of Apple design? It seems so, but when insult, injury, and incoherence result I’d round up the crew and have another look at our strategy.