10,000 floor elevator challenge

I once wrote an assignment where I was invited to design interfaces for a 10,000 floor elevator. After I submitted my assignment, I began reviewing the work of my peers and I found that they had come up with some wonderfully creative designs to enable users to call an elevator, plan their trip, and access sources of entertainment along their entire elevator ride up and down several thousand floors.

When I did this assignment, my mind didn’t go towards designing interfaces. Instead, I approached this sort of building like I would a city. At 4.3 meters per floor, this kind of building would stretch 43 kilometers off the earth, nearing the top end of the stratosphere [43 kilometers is coincidentally the width of Toronto]. This is a vertical city, and like most cities, it would be well served with a public transportation network.

Rather than think of elevators as boxes riding cables, I thought of them as trains. I then set up express lines and local lines to service the vertical city.

The express line stops every five hundred floors, making a total of twenty stops on the line, with just over two kilometers between stations. The local line stops every fifty floors, and there’s one between each of the express line’s stations. Once these lines are set up, the floors between the local line stations can be serviced by a network of ordinary elevators, escalators, and stairs.

Next, I imagined the foundation of this building. From a bird’s-eye view, I thought that four stations at each corner of the building’s square foundation would work well. Each station would have one express and one local line running in both upward and downward directions.

This foundation wouldn’t work under the laws of gravity, but for a building like this to work, you’d need something like space elevator tethers running through the building. While a space elevator is a science fiction technology, I’m fairly certain that building a pyramid-shaped 10,000 storey building is even less feasible, both structurally and financially.

Once the transportation system is set up, the rest is straightforward, and we can draw on already-existing interfaces. Existing designs are familiar to users, so they don’t have to learn anything new to get on their way. The only difference users will notice is that they’ll be travelling vertically and have to deal with popping ears as they climb into or descend from the stratosphere.

Reflecting on this exercise, I can’t help but think about the overuse of design. Design is a useful way to think about a problem, but only if there’s a significant problem. In many cases, I think less design is a more effective solution. Design shouldn’t be about social engineering every moment, every gap in a person’s experience. Since care and control can be two sides of the same coin, I think it’s important to consider the boundaries between supporting the user to improve their experience and controlling their every move. In this sense, good design is more about carving out a space to empower individuals to do what they want to do, like, in the above case, read a good book or access wifi on an elevator-train heading to floor 5047.