Ninth grade preceded by eighth and followed by tenth is efficient . . . unless students move forward without knowing the value of what they have learned.
To get from hungry to full, McDonald’s is efficient as long as a national epidemic of diabetes does not slow things down.
From house to store? Your SUV works great until you hit traffic and a landscape disgorged by malls.
Nothing made efficiency so popular as the factory. But soon factories will be places where robots do everything.
Is that efficient? Given that robots do not require something to do to be happy and humans do?
Or, as an about-to-be unemployed factory worker asks in The West Wing: What’s the good of an economy without the people in it?
I doubt not argue with sentiment for work on an assembly line.
I argue instead to dismantle efficiency as we know it.
Besides, to design for efficiency is odd because the life we live, from a biological standpoint, should be as inefficient as possible. From birth to death? Stretch that one out to 110 if you can.
But we design and program and manage for efficiency as if we—and our systems—were wholly contained, existing only for discrete moments rather than in the web of nature and a continuum of time.
So . . . what about the efficiency of someone who lives to 105, makes a few pairs of shoes during their lifetime, and yet pumps humanity into the system via their super slow, super satisfying work?
Can we design for that? Make that a class?