All students of the Nottingham Trent University might have noticed that the elevators in the Newton building are a bit different from ordinary elevators. When I used it for the first time I was totally confused, I walked into the elevator and found no button to select floors and then I looked like an idiot.
Now I have been going to lectures there for almost half a year and I can use the elevators with no difficulty.
So I am now trying to describe how they work.
There are only three buttons in the cars, open the door, close the door and call for emergency, that is because all the buttons with numbers on them to choose the floors are outside the cars, just next to the doors. Before you enter the elevator, you select the floor you want to go to, then the screen over the buttons will tell you which car you need to wait for. I have never seen anything like this in my life! Before I started using my brain to think about the reason, I thought it was a stupid idea because instead of having one set of buttons inside the car, they now need a set of buttons for everyone single floor and that sounds like a big waste.
Then I saw the clever bit, because you need to tell the computer which floor you want to go first, the computer can tell everybody that's going to the same floor to wait in front of the same car, it improvs the efficiency. It avoids the circumstance when one car has stop at every single floor.
The disadvantage is also obvious, if you decided to change your idea and go to another floor while in the car, you will not be able to do anything. That's fine if it's been used in a university, because you always know which lecture room you are going to. However there might be problems if this system is applied in places like a shopping centre.
I didn't know what this kind of elevator is called until I read about it on Wikipedia, it is called destination control system, developed by Schindler. Some elevator companies say that this system can improve efficiency by 30%.
I don't know anything about elevator design and I am not going to act like I am an expert, but this system is really clever.
According to Wikipedia, the first electric elevator was built in 1880 by Siemens and elevator was invented long before that. The destination control system was introduced in 1992, so it's been over a hundred years of its invention that someone had came up with an idea to improve itees efficiency. What I can lear from this is really very simple, to think out side of the box and in this case, it's really outside of the box. As design students we are always encouraged to do so, but it is so difficult to achieve. We are too used to everything we know, everything we use and everything we learned.
So I could imagine time goes back around 20 years, in Switzerland, an elevator designer was sitting on his table and went 'right, I am fed up with elevators have to stop at every single floor, let's make something new'
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