9 ms·

Floorplan Light Switches

111 points by radley 13y ago

noonespecial 13y ago
In all of the houses I've lived in here in the USA, its worse. Electricians literally don't care what order the switches are wired. The just grab wires and start adding switches. This results in the switch for the light you want to use often being farthest from the light on the panel. Mostly, its just random. It usually dives me nuts until I reorder them.
- yaddayadda 13y ago
  My very first "improvement" in my new house was "fixing" the order of light switches (before I had even moved into the house), so that they had some logical relationship to the physical layout of the space.
- rbritton 13y ago
  It's even worse when they put enough lights on a circuit that the first person to turn on a hair dryer without shutting most of them off blows the circuit breaker.
  - miahi 13y ago
    That's just incorrect wiring from my point of view; I don't know the US regulations, but you shouldn't mix lights and power sockets on the same circuit. Lights should have their own circuit breaker, of less amps than a socket circuit.
    - rbritton 13y ago
      I agree, but to my knowledge it's fully legal in most areas. I'm thankful I caught them putting my office on the same circuit and fixed it. One of my printers alone draws 13 amps while printing. I just wish I would've looked into the rest of the house when I found the office wiring.
      - DanBC 13y ago
        Wait what? What kind of printer do you have?
        yardie 13y ago
        Probably one of those Xerox documentcenters. Printing is sort of a misnomer as it can also bind, staple, fold, envelope, sort and duplex. When I used to work in prepress the printer we had was as long as a truck, used 480V, and had it's own fume hood to capture all the ozone it put out.
      - vonmoltke 13y ago
        If you had a known 13A load, why didn't you have a dedicated 15A branch circuit installed for it? Its uncommon but not prohibited in residential construction.
    - vonmoltke 13y ago
      In the US, both the trade and the National Electric Code have a distinct preference to laying out branch circuits by room as much as possible. I lean towards that view as well, as it is a better logical organization for servicing and means you do not need to cut the lighting to half the house to work on a fixture.
newbrict 13y ago
Just yesterday I was thinking about how to solve this exact problem, this is a great solution. However it takes a lot of effort to get switched like that made.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  However it takes a lot of effort to get switched like that made. It would probably be cheaper just to use a touchscreen, and the switches could be updated if the room changes.
  - BrandonMarc 13y ago
    Plus, there are economies of scale: that same device can be used for just about every room / configuration, instead of having to create 100's of unique versions of the thing.
    - qq66 13y ago
      The hoped-for outcome for 3D printing is that it will bring the cost of a custom faceplate to maybe 5x times that of a generic faceplate instead of 100x. Of course the hardest part would be the software to turn the room layout into a 3D printed faceplate.
  - ekux44 13y ago
    This. I question the need for custom smart light switch hardware like Goldee when low end Android tablets are significantly cheaper thanks to to the economics of scale.
Domenic_S 13y ago
> Why not arrange the switches on a floor plan of the space, so it would be easy to determine which switch worked which light? Because our current binary model of "flip this switch, this light comes on" is dumb. We want lighting "scenarios", not control of individual bulbs/small clusters of bulbs. What you should be solving for is these lighting scenarios, for example "I walk to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and I want the pathway lit" (this is called pathway lighting). Or "I want ambient light in the living room appropriate for movie watching", or "I want the nightlights turned on." Believe it or not this is already (kind of) solved with what's called Lighting Control Systems [0]. They're complicated, expensive, and I've only seen them on very, very expensive homes. Supposedly the price is coming down, who knows. I think affordable consumer-grade is going to be an internet-of-things kind of solution. [0] http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Residential-Commercial-Solutions/Pages/Residential-Solutions/WholeHomeSolutions.aspx http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Residential-Commercial-Solutions...
- nitrogen 13y ago
  My own approach to this from a few years ago is to have a system that tries to determine what you want to do and adjusts the lights accordingly, while allowing manual override for the times it gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk
  - Domenic_S 13y ago
    Wow. That is really incredible! See, that's the living-in-the-future kind of thing I want today!
  - bemmu 13y ago
    That's awesome. Our simple system is just to have motion detector bulbs in the hallway and bathroom, which is where you usually want lights to turn on when there are people moving in those spaces.
    - gbog 13y ago
      I hate lights on motion (or sound) detectors. What if you want to stay there for while, maybe talking with a guest, or reading some paper? Or maybe you want to hook something on the wall? Well placed switches are good enough, no?
msutherl 13y ago
I recently designed a laboratory and, inspired by having read Donald Norman's anecdote, tried to have the contractors match the switch layout to the position of lights on the ceiling. The result was an extremely ugly array of 2x3 separate panels that are mapped properly, but in the reverse order of what you would expect. I am now always turning on the light at the end of the lab when I want the one that is above me. I'm not sure it's any better than a linear array. So much for that.
- lstamour 13y ago
  Was it more horizontally laid out or not? The original goal was to orient the switches so that, somewhat horizontally mapped to the same coordinates, you would see a clear marking of where you are and be able to turn on lights "in front" of you or "behind you". So if your finger started from the "You are here" dot, flipping the switch closest to it would turn on the light nearest you. Alternatively, perhaps you could put a symbol or distinguishing feature on the light switch you hit most often to indicate that it's not the one you want. E.g. a window, room feature, or label the door?
  - msutherl 13y ago
    No, they are vertical. An horizontal layout was not an option in this case. Not a bad idea to include labels – thanks for that!
strictfp 13y ago
Why put all switches in one place? I have never seen this in Europe. Switches are usually close to their corresponding light source.
- sirsar 13y ago
  If you have multiple smaller lights, it's quicker to turn them all on at the door than to do a lap around the room. Of course this is an after-the-fact rationalization; in reality, it's probably just easier to install one set of switches than several.
  - alexchamberlain 13y ago
    Again, why one switch one light? In my lounge, the 1 lightswitch turns on 4 lights, and in my hallway, there is 2 lightswitches for 1 light.
    - __david__ 13y ago
      Well, you do that if you ever want the ability to turn on just one of them. If you don't then your setup is fine.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jaynos 13y ago
  It's easier and cheaper for the electrician to run one power line and then distribute power via switches. Doesn't make it right, but most people put up with it.
raldi 13y ago
I've found two switches in a panel to be reasonably memorable, three in a row to be just over the border into confusion, and four or more right out. Fortunately, all the places in my home that had more than two were places where you could control both interior and exterior circuits. My solution was to use black switches for the exterior lights and white for the interior. Like, a single panel might have a black and two whites, or a pair of each. I find it much more intuitive that way.
paulgerhardt 13y ago
I love "Design of Everyday Things" but this floor plan light switch design always irratated me. Essentially you are sacrificing a high efficiency, low cognitive load task (that happens to have a poor first time experience) for a complex glossy UI that is intuitive but high cognitive load. (Suddenly you have to engage your visual system and import your full object recognition library where previously it was a finger twitch task.) We've struggled with this a lot at Lockitron. My personal belief is repetive actions (locking/unlocking) should be mechanically efficient while complex actions (inviting guests) should be more visually intuitive. For another light switch concept see the Goldee.
- ekux44 13y ago
  Has Goldee ever shown details on user input yet? I can only find concept photos with it lit us showing status, and vague mentions of gesture detection.
- arrrg 13y ago
  It depends on the application. Just think about how big shared spaces that would need such a light switch are typically used. Any one person will use the light switches only rarely (and frequently forget what the switches do between using them, so it’s not only about first time use). In such a situation an easily understandable light switch is preferable to a row of switches (especially since disturbing other people in that space by randomly switching on and off lights is not a pleasant experience for anyone). Whenever a space is used by many different people such a design seems preferable to me. Also, these big shared spaces happen to be the ones that would require such a light switch in the first place. Replacing every light switch with a floor plan switch? That would be a bad idea, sure, but there are applications that make a lot of sense.
- mattlutze 13y ago
  The better argument, I think, is "Do we need that much optimization?" Does the trial and error performed by a casual switch user cost us so much that spending the money on custom layout light panels makes sense? I think only in a very small set of applications. To counterpoint your second paragraph: The existing wall switches are much more than a poor first time experience and require more cognition. When using the "efficient" vertical wall switch panel, you already have to import your full object recognition library without errors. You then have to call up your list of mappings between rooms and switch position on the panel so you can flip the correct one. With the map, you only need to load your scheme of the office into active memory to select the appropriate switch. Further, the map provides error checking for your cognitive model, confirming / reinforcing the true layout (in a complex map, a user is bound to forget a room or take longer to recall it's location without the external map). Anecdotally, I lived in my family's third house for a year and a half, and never completely memorized the functions of the 6 switch panel in our front hall. Imagine an office, where different panels control different light banks depending on where they are in that large office space. The common user (average person in the office seldom turns on or off various things) will need to hunt for the right switch.
tmslnz 13y ago
This is how it should be done. No doubt. http://www.flickr.com/photos/designunits/8413499081/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/designunits/8413499081/
fit2rule 13y ago
I have a better design than this. It centers around the idea of having the light switch, itself, be near the zone of light that it operates. So instead of having a large panel of switches, we simply pair the switch with the light bulb. This means - revolutionary, I know - that the switch is itself in the same room/area as the light that it provides. Also, the switches themselves have little lamps in them, so you can find them in the dark. Problem solved!
viggity 13y ago
This is incredibly cool. I'm consulting for a company right now that does Power over Ethernet Lighting to enable fine grain control of lighting scenarios. I've definitely shared this link with the team. If anyone is interested in checking us out, www.igor-tech.com. My email is in my profile if you'd like to contact. We don't have lcd touch screen switches yet, but it is certainly on the radar.
mhb 13y ago
Are there really many locations in a conventional house layout which can afford to devote the floor space this requires? Having this stick out from the wall is a huge problem. If the house has enough space for that not to be an issue the owners probably already have an expensive lighting control system with labels by the push buttons indicating the type of lighting to use. Look at the illustration and imagine how many times residents and guests walk into that thing. Maybe v2.0 flips down or something but that's a whole other problem.
- sp332 13y ago
  Look at the bottom of the article, the newer version doesn't stick out. More pics http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/03/02/know-your-switches/ http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/03/02/know-your-switches/
  - mhb 13y ago
    Right. But in Norman's original description there was a significant emphasis on the horizontal orientation: the switches should be placed on a horizontal plane
Zigurd 13y ago
I have to wonder why more than one commenter states a preference for lighting "scenarios" versus a visual representation of "what's where." I'm one of those people who can't be bothered to fiddle with my Eclipse perspectives even though I'm sure I could summon twenty strong opinions here on why I should. Do you really think people (excluding single men under thirty left to their own devices to configure a dwelling) will compose "lighting scenarios" for their homes? Having a map of light status and location in my entryway and on my mobile devices would be sweet. No labelling. Program it once and it's good until the walls move. In particular, I don't think this has "high cognitive load." To me it looks like a toddler could get "touch the place and the thing happens there."
upofadown 13y ago
Now that we have light sources that can produce a small amount of light efficiently (LEDs) we don't really need that many lights built into the structure anyways. People can function in really really dim light. Just light up the whole building slightly all the time. You end up needing just the task lights and those are better controlled with switches at the place the light is used.
btgeekboy 13y ago
The design quickly fails when lights are not segmented out by location, but by type. For example, if you have accent lighting that goes around the top of the room, and then pathway lighting on the bottom, where does it show up on a 2D floorplan?

111 points by radley 13y ago

In all of the houses I've lived in here in the USA, its worse. Electricians literally don't care what order the switches are wired. The just grab wires and start adding switches. This results in the switch for the light you want to use often being farthest from the light on the panel. Mostly, its just random. It usually dives me nuts until I reorder them.

yaddayadda 13y ago
My very first "improvement" in my new house was "fixing" the order of light switches (before I had even moved into the house), so that they had some logical relationship to the physical layout of the space.
rbritton 13y ago
It's even worse when they put enough lights on a circuit that the first person to turn on a hair dryer without shutting most of them off blows the circuit breaker.
- miahi 13y ago
  That's just incorrect wiring from my point of view; I don't know the US regulations, but you shouldn't mix lights and power sockets on the same circuit. Lights should have their own circuit breaker, of less amps than a socket circuit.
  - rbritton 13y ago
    I agree, but to my knowledge it's fully legal in most areas. I'm thankful I caught them putting my office on the same circuit and fixed it. One of my printers alone draws 13 amps while printing. I just wish I would've looked into the rest of the house when I found the office wiring.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      Wait what? What kind of printer do you have?
      - yardie 13y ago
        Probably one of those Xerox documentcenters. Printing is sort of a misnomer as it can also bind, staple, fold, envelope, sort and duplex. When I used to work in prepress the printer we had was as long as a truck, used 480V, and had it's own fume hood to capture all the ozone it put out.
    - vonmoltke 13y ago
      If you had a known 13A load, why didn't you have a dedicated 15A branch circuit installed for it? Its uncommon but not prohibited in residential construction.
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    In the US, both the trade and the National Electric Code have a distinct preference to laying out branch circuits by room as much as possible. I lean towards that view as well, as it is a better logical organization for servicing and means you do not need to cut the lighting to half the house to work on a fixture.

newbrict 13y ago

Just yesterday I was thinking about how to solve this exact problem, this is a great solution. However it takes a lot of effort to get switched like that made.

nitrogen 13y ago
However it takes a lot of effort to get switched like that made. It would probably be cheaper just to use a touchscreen, and the switches could be updated if the room changes.
- BrandonMarc 13y ago
  Plus, there are economies of scale: that same device can be used for just about every room / configuration, instead of having to create 100's of unique versions of the thing.
  - qq66 13y ago
    The hoped-for outcome for 3D printing is that it will bring the cost of a custom faceplate to maybe 5x times that of a generic faceplate instead of 100x. Of course the hardest part would be the software to turn the room layout into a 3D printed faceplate.
- ekux44 13y ago
  This. I question the need for custom smart light switch hardware like Goldee when low end Android tablets are significantly cheaper thanks to to the economics of scale.

Domenic_S 13y ago

> Why not arrange the switches on a floor plan of the space, so it would be easy to determine which switch worked which light? Because our current binary model of "flip this switch, this light comes on" is dumb. We want lighting "scenarios", not control of individual bulbs/small clusters of bulbs. What you should be solving for is these lighting scenarios, for example "I walk to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and I want the pathway lit" (this is called pathway lighting). Or "I want ambient light in the living room appropriate for movie watching", or "I want the nightlights turned on." Believe it or not this is already (kind of) solved with what's called Lighting Control Systems [0]. They're complicated, expensive, and I've only seen them on very, very expensive homes. Supposedly the price is coming down, who knows. I think affordable consumer-grade is going to be an internet-of-things kind of solution. [0] http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Residential-Commercial-Solutions/Pages/Residential-Solutions/WholeHomeSolutions.aspx http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Residential-Commercial-Solutions...

nitrogen 13y ago
My own approach to this from a few years ago is to have a system that tries to determine what you want to do and adjusts the lights accordingly, while allowing manual override for the times it gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  Wow. That is really incredible! See, that's the living-in-the-future kind of thing I want today!
- bemmu 13y ago
  That's awesome. Our simple system is just to have motion detector bulbs in the hallway and bathroom, which is where you usually want lights to turn on when there are people moving in those spaces.
  - gbog 13y ago
    I hate lights on motion (or sound) detectors. What if you want to stay there for while, maybe talking with a guest, or reading some paper? Or maybe you want to hook something on the wall? Well placed switches are good enough, no?

msutherl 13y ago

I recently designed a laboratory and, inspired by having read Donald Norman's anecdote, tried to have the contractors match the switch layout to the position of lights on the ceiling. The result was an extremely ugly array of 2x3 separate panels that are mapped properly, but in the reverse order of what you would expect. I am now always turning on the light at the end of the lab when I want the one that is above me. I'm not sure it's any better than a linear array. So much for that.

lstamour 13y ago
Was it more horizontally laid out or not? The original goal was to orient the switches so that, somewhat horizontally mapped to the same coordinates, you would see a clear marking of where you are and be able to turn on lights "in front" of you or "behind you". So if your finger started from the "You are here" dot, flipping the switch closest to it would turn on the light nearest you. Alternatively, perhaps you could put a symbol or distinguishing feature on the light switch you hit most often to indicate that it's not the one you want. E.g. a window, room feature, or label the door?
- msutherl 13y ago
  No, they are vertical. An horizontal layout was not an option in this case. Not a bad idea to include labels – thanks for that!

strictfp 13y ago

Why put all switches in one place? I have never seen this in Europe. Switches are usually close to their corresponding light source.

sirsar 13y ago
If you have multiple smaller lights, it's quicker to turn them all on at the door than to do a lap around the room. Of course this is an after-the-fact rationalization; in reality, it's probably just easier to install one set of switches than several.
- alexchamberlain 13y ago
  Again, why one switch one light? In my lounge, the 1 lightswitch turns on 4 lights, and in my hallway, there is 2 lightswitches for 1 light.
  - __david__ 13y ago
    Well, you do that if you ever want the ability to turn on just one of them. If you don't then your setup is fine.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jaynos 13y ago
It's easier and cheaper for the electrician to run one power line and then distribute power via switches. Doesn't make it right, but most people put up with it.

raldi 13y ago

I've found two switches in a panel to be reasonably memorable, three in a row to be just over the border into confusion, and four or more right out. Fortunately, all the places in my home that had more than two were places where you could control both interior and exterior circuits. My solution was to use black switches for the exterior lights and white for the interior. Like, a single panel might have a black and two whites, or a pair of each. I find it much more intuitive that way.

paulgerhardt 13y ago

I love "Design of Everyday Things" but this floor plan light switch design always irratated me. Essentially you are sacrificing a high efficiency, low cognitive load task (that happens to have a poor first time experience) for a complex glossy UI that is intuitive but high cognitive load. (Suddenly you have to engage your visual system and import your full object recognition library where previously it was a finger twitch task.) We've struggled with this a lot at Lockitron. My personal belief is repetive actions (locking/unlocking) should be mechanically efficient while complex actions (inviting guests) should be more visually intuitive. For another light switch concept see the Goldee.

ekux44 13y ago
Has Goldee ever shown details on user input yet? I can only find concept photos with it lit us showing status, and vague mentions of gesture detection.
arrrg 13y ago
It depends on the application. Just think about how big shared spaces that would need such a light switch are typically used. Any one person will use the light switches only rarely (and frequently forget what the switches do between using them, so it’s not only about first time use). In such a situation an easily understandable light switch is preferable to a row of switches (especially since disturbing other people in that space by randomly switching on and off lights is not a pleasant experience for anyone). Whenever a space is used by many different people such a design seems preferable to me. Also, these big shared spaces happen to be the ones that would require such a light switch in the first place. Replacing every light switch with a floor plan switch? That would be a bad idea, sure, but there are applications that make a lot of sense.
mattlutze 13y ago
The better argument, I think, is "Do we need that much optimization?" Does the trial and error performed by a casual switch user cost us so much that spending the money on custom layout light panels makes sense? I think only in a very small set of applications. To counterpoint your second paragraph: The existing wall switches are much more than a poor first time experience and require more cognition. When using the "efficient" vertical wall switch panel, you already have to import your full object recognition library without errors. You then have to call up your list of mappings between rooms and switch position on the panel so you can flip the correct one. With the map, you only need to load your scheme of the office into active memory to select the appropriate switch. Further, the map provides error checking for your cognitive model, confirming / reinforcing the true layout (in a complex map, a user is bound to forget a room or take longer to recall it's location without the external map). Anecdotally, I lived in my family's third house for a year and a half, and never completely memorized the functions of the 6 switch panel in our front hall. Imagine an office, where different panels control different light banks depending on where they are in that large office space. The common user (average person in the office seldom turns on or off various things) will need to hunt for the right switch.

tmslnz 13y ago

This is how it should be done. No doubt. http://www.flickr.com/photos/designunits/8413499081/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/designunits/8413499081/

fit2rule 13y ago

I have a better design than this. It centers around the idea of having the light switch, itself, be near the zone of light that it operates. So instead of having a large panel of switches, we simply pair the switch with the light bulb. This means - revolutionary, I know - that the switch is itself in the same room/area as the light that it provides. Also, the switches themselves have little lamps in them, so you can find them in the dark. Problem solved!

viggity 13y ago

This is incredibly cool. I'm consulting for a company right now that does Power over Ethernet Lighting to enable fine grain control of lighting scenarios. I've definitely shared this link with the team. If anyone is interested in checking us out, www.igor-tech.com. My email is in my profile if you'd like to contact. We don't have lcd touch screen switches yet, but it is certainly on the radar.

mhb 13y ago

Are there really many locations in a conventional house layout which can afford to devote the floor space this requires? Having this stick out from the wall is a huge problem. If the house has enough space for that not to be an issue the owners probably already have an expensive lighting control system with labels by the push buttons indicating the type of lighting to use. Look at the illustration and imagine how many times residents and guests walk into that thing. Maybe v2.0 flips down or something but that's a whole other problem.

sp332 13y ago
Look at the bottom of the article, the newer version doesn't stick out. More pics http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/03/02/know-your-switches/ http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/03/02/know-your-switches/
- mhb 13y ago
  Right. But in Norman's original description there was a significant emphasis on the horizontal orientation: the switches should be placed on a horizontal plane

Zigurd 13y ago

I have to wonder why more than one commenter states a preference for lighting "scenarios" versus a visual representation of "what's where." I'm one of those people who can't be bothered to fiddle with my Eclipse perspectives even though I'm sure I could summon twenty strong opinions here on why I should. Do you really think people (excluding single men under thirty left to their own devices to configure a dwelling) will compose "lighting scenarios" for their homes? Having a map of light status and location in my entryway and on my mobile devices would be sweet. No labelling. Program it once and it's good until the walls move. In particular, I don't think this has "high cognitive load." To me it looks like a toddler could get "touch the place and the thing happens there."

upofadown 13y ago

Now that we have light sources that can produce a small amount of light efficiently (LEDs) we don't really need that many lights built into the structure anyways. People can function in really really dim light. Just light up the whole building slightly all the time. You end up needing just the task lights and those are better controlled with switches at the place the light is used.

btgeekboy 13y ago

The design quickly fails when lights are not segmented out by location, but by type. For example, if you have accent lighting that goes around the top of the room, and then pathway lighting on the bottom, where does it show up on a 2D floorplan?