DOET Shower

I stayed at a friend's apartment a few weeks ago. It is difficult to describe the decor, but if my grandmother and Master P were forced to collaboratively design an apartment, his place is what you might get:

Walls covered in paint made from melted silver, gold dragon faucet heads roaring out of the wet-bar sink, all trimmed with flower-print or toile curtains. That sort of thing.

The shower is, of course, also over-the-top; one of those awesome luxury showers with heads and nozzles jutting out every which-way from the granite walls. Sounds like great fun, but when it came time to actually use it, I was confronted with the following:

Not only did I fail to figure out how to control the temperature and which shower heads were active, but I couldn't even figure out how to turn the thing on and off! I was assaulted from all sides by water of all different temperatures during the minutes of fiddling it took for me to turn this stupid thing off.

I was horrified enough by this set of controls that I actually bothered to take this photo to document the insanity.

Yesterday I started reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and, to my delight, came upon the following diagram:

With the wonderful caption: "What do you do here? Why would anyone dream up this scheme?"

I am very much looking forward to reading this book.