Tentempié

Signs to avoid dirty hands at Boqueria Market in Barcelona. In terms of natural selection what makes us strong as individuals, makes us weak as a specie.

Milk advertisements are usually targeted towards childhood. Not this one.

“Don’t stop. Continue and fill the rest of the platform”. Obey the master. Period.

Seen in Seville subway.

Seen in Madrid.

Shanghai’s huge train station.

Some days ago I found this unused parking meter near a comercial area in Beijing. It was installed about 5 years ago, but for nothing. I was told that car owners didn’t know how to use it, and didn’t care about the whole thing. Now it stands as a testimony of the locals slipshod sense for authority.

This is a lift calling deck, with nonsense duplicated buttons. Remember me the double checking problem some people experiment.

Seen in Glory Mall, Beijing

It’s taken for granted that order makes our life easier. And it’s also better known that shopping malls are created so that you have to walk a little bit to come across shops while you seek for the next escalators.

What really surprised me was to know that some malls are designed to get us completely lost. They talk about it in The secret life of buildings, a great series that face how building’s shape affect us. Since watching it, I’ve been quite obsessed  analyzing path routes in every shopping mall I visit. It turns up to be kind of fun to discover every trick that architects have planned to makes us walk along the building:

• Escalators that drives you not just one floor, but accidentally two or even more without almost noticing it.
• Lifts that works only for some floors.
• Levels that are only accessed by some lifts and escalators.
• Different placement of lifts and escalator, it’s a seek and find game to spot the right one that takes you where you want.
• Solitary escalators to which you have to walk, just to check if it’s going up or down.
• The list continues up to the infinite…

The series can be found here:

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=XWZHIMJO

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=GHIWY73L

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=ZWP5AZOP

Thanks to Dámaris for telling about this!

Almost imposible to understand the quantitative differences in minutes between one sandwatch and another. The  Indication should say: “5 minutes walk to the farthest boarding gate plus 5 minutes more to fully understand this graph”.

Seen on Beijing’s old airport.