I think the last innovation the trays we use at airport security lines saw was placing ads on them. Staff shuffle them around - they always seem to be away from where the passengers really need them. So, I was pleased to see Holger Mueller describe an innovation he saw in Sweden
"We all know the drill. You have passed the boarding pass and
ID check and still have to wait for you and your belongings to be further
scrutinized, before you can make it to your plane. It is a classic automation
problem, for which airports all over the world have come up with different
solutions. The most common answer, however, is to make you put your carry-on
belongings on a tray. That helps prevent loss of loose objects, which would
delay the entire continuity of the checkpoint.
But the solution to one problem often creates another: How
do you get the empty trays back to eagerly awaiting passengers? In the US we've all
seen the built-at-home carts that are shoved back to the front of the security
line. That's been the solution pretty much everywhere else, too.
Excluding, of course, the efficiency minded Germany and Switzerland. Here the empty trays
are placed vertically (more trays, less space) before sliding down an incline
to the beginning of the checkpoint. Nice.
However, last weekend I discovered an even more
sophisticated solution at Stockholm's
Arlanda airport: While waiting in line I was already surprised by how fast it
was moving. As I approached I could see that the passengers in front of me,
were retrieving trays from a seemingly endless supply beneath the transport
belt. No security personnel were involved in pushing tray-loaded carts back. No
hiccups or delays, just a seamless flow out of the of the wooden paneled (it's Scandinavia) tray-construction's.

Surely someone was quite busy at the other end of the line,
placing trays on the returning conveyor belt. When I reached the end of tray
line however, to my surprise, the trays got on their return journey by
themselves. When picking up my belongings the mystery was solved: Via light
sensor barriers and a camera, the system would wait till a passenger had
collected all content from their tray(s). I then also noticed that the blue
base of the tray must play a role. Once the tray was empty, it was
automatically transported forward to a trap door-like segment of the conveyor
belt. It would seesaw, gravity doing its job and setting the tray on its
rolling way back to the front of the security line, hidden beneath the forward
moving belt with the passenger belongings.
Credit to Arlanda and the Swedes for the fastest solution to
the tray turnaround challenge that all airport security checkpoints see these
days. Have you seen other, possibly even better solutions?"
Photo Credit
Technological "Solutionism"
I am enjoying Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here because he points to so many potential candidates for this innovation blog – BinCam, a smart garbage can proposal from Europe which leverages smartphone cameras, Amazon Mechanical Turk, gamification concepts and more. Santa Monica’s “smart parking”. Augmented Reality in Japanese kitchens. Actually similar examples have already made their way into my books and blogs.
Morozov’s goal is not to wow, but to force a pause. So, he wonders if the researchers proposing BinCam have thought about its ethics. He would only call the parking meters in Santa Monica “smart” if they allowed a driver to decide what to do with leftover credit not just let it automatically subsidize the city budget. Or if the meter provided citizens stats about who typically parks there – affluent citizens or local students. He says the kitchen AR app leaves the user intellectually diminished.
His basic premise is just because we can use technology to do something, does not mean we should. He quotes Gilles Paquet: “Solutionism (interprets) issues as puzzles to which there is a solution, rather than problems to which there may be a response”
As I go through the book, I have several reactions
a) He misses the theme of "standing on the shoulders of giants" which has progressed mankind for generations. Reviewing the Zipments site recently, it hit me how dated are Fedex's package tracking, eBay's user ratings, Google Maps, PayPal APIs and other concepts they leverage. Little of what they are doing is technologically innovative at this point. But as a whole, they are crowdsourcing same day and home delivery - a minor trend which could only reshape grocery, logistics and countless other industries.
b) Society and markets have a way of winnowing out frivolous solutions. He points to many solutions which will die a quick and natural death. But I would let the market decide not individuals, even as smart as he is. I am jaded having listened to many enterprise tech execs pooh pooh consumer tech for a while now, when they should be embarassed their data centers are nowhere as efficient as Google's, when their Big Data is puny compared to Facebook's, when their supply chain is simplistic compared to Apple's.
c) His criticisms of some of the solutions need to be taken in the same spirit as those of consumers who keep clamoring for features in the next camera in their phone – higher resolution, low-light performance, ever faster auto-focus etc. Version 1,2, 3 of anything screams to be improved upon
d) Finally, not sure how he would put the genie back in the bottle. The proliferation of technologies has torn down barriers for anyone to try and solve any problem, small or big. The most powerful example of that comes in the recent Time cover story on cancer. It points to a cocktail of attacks on cancer which have only recently become available “bioengineering, nanotechnology, drug compounds and data gathering, including protein data, splicing data and mutation data, all of which is being hoisted into view by ever cheaper computational muscle.” Even more fascinating, the leadership for this attack on cancer is not coming from the traditional medical elite or from Valley VCs. It is coming from Stand Up 2 Cancer – founded by mostly Hollywood types, impatient with progress in the fight against cancer.
Yes, we are treating many issues as puzzles and applying all kinds of tech to solve them. To me, at least that’s a reason to celebrate “solutionism” even if not all the puzzles are Grand Challenges.
March 30, 2013 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)