Hotel Safe

A quick example of design simplicity. Hotel room safes got it right. There is only one thing you can ever do – enter your password and turn the knob. When the safe is open, you specify a password, turn the knob counterclockwise and your stuff is safely stored. When the safe is closed, you enter the same password, turn the knob clockwise and retrieve your stuff. This is so simple it seems obvious. It's not. Whoever developed the first one understood the elegance of simplicity. Someone on the design team repeatedly said "no" and didn't budge. It is very easy to imagine a safe that requires investment of time to figure out how to use. For such a safe, one might lack confidence that it has worked right or that it will properly reopen. Perhaps a mode button that toggles between "set password" and "store valuables." And a knob? Can't you envision engineers around a table saying that's old fashioned and replacing it with buttons and red/green indicator lights that are solid red when locked and flash green in "set password" mode? A clear button. A reset button. An enter button. Maybe even A and B buttons. Think about the digital alarm clock. I don't know about you, but I long ago stopped taking the time to figure that out in my hotel room. It's too much trouble and I don't sleep soundly worrying about whether it will wake me up on time. The safe designers heeded the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exuper: "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."