Switches
Mumbai 28th August 2013
I have arrived in Mumbai where I will be attending and guest speaking at the Architecture and Design Summit tomorrow organised by the economic Times of India. While the Indian economy seems to be in shambles, a lot of my projects here have come to a slowdown, there still seem to be a big appetite for design conferences and building summits. There are still a few more planned for the rest of the year! As I am about to join the welcome diner organised for the participating speakers, panellists, contributors and other organising participants, as always, I took a look around my hotel room (Hyatt). One of the biggest issues in all hotel room designs are the light switches. A lot of the time there is no logic to the switches and you spent the first 10 minutes testing by trial and error finding out what the switches are supposed to do. I was in Langkawi last week and inspected my hotel room control systems as well, I liked the basic simplicity, no complicated scene setting. Manual dimmers which are set to night mode by the hotel staff when they come to turn down your bed for the night.
Honestly speaking I have yet to find the perfect solution, not in the last place because most operators all seem to have different opinions on how they want the room controls. One thing is fr sure…the simpler the better. But then there is this belief that 5-6 star hotels should have more sophisticated controls then lower graded hotels. I once stayed in a hotel where the controls for the lighting were operated through your intelligent TV. In other words you needed your tv remote to access the lighting menu on the screen to switch lights on or off…I consider myself reasonably clever when it comes to lighting controls but that was absolutely over the top and far too complicated.
This hotel rooms has the simplest of switches, one master switch at the entrance, on board switches for all floor, wall and desk lights, one switch for the bathroom lights and one bedside master switch to switch of the room lights when you are in bed. Easy to understand, easy to operate, you don’t need a master’s degree to figure it out…way to go.
Light Watch 4-143: Here are some pics from various hotels I stayed in over the last 2 weeks in China, Malaysia, including today’s in Mumbai…some good some less good 🙂
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