Thursday 28 October 2021

I Have An Unfortunate Habit,

if anything electrical goes wrong,


or takes a long time to react, I immediately start pushing buttons, which is bad news if it is a computer, the television remote, or I am in a lift/elevator, speaking of lifts or elevators, when thinking of manufactures I think of Otis, Schindler and Kone, to name a few, but it appears that they do not always make their own buttons, that falls to Shimada Denki Seisakusho who supplied the photographs, the company is a specialized manufacturer of custom-made elevator buttons and arrival lights based in Tokyo, Japan, the company was founded in 1933,

and here is the thing, if you go on a factory visit to Shimada Denki Seisakusho, they literally let you press a sample of every single button made in the company’s 88-year history, the 1,000 Buttons display went viral on Japanese social media this week after the company’s Twitter account published a photo of it. The metallic panel is designed primarily as an attraction for juvenile visitors, as pressing any of the buttons courses it to light up, encouraging kids to press them all, or at least all they can reach, however, adults confessed the urge to press every one of the buttons as well,

the unusual display became so popular that news outlets started contacting the button factory about it. Apparently, it consists of over 1,000 (1,048, to be exact) differently designed elevator buttons, of which the “Never Press” one is the most pressed, that will be me then, pressing it twice as the first time it did not work!

Shimada Denki Seisakusho started organizing tours in 2018, the 1,000 Buttons attraction was created in the summer of last year, as a way to engage with users, the idea for the button wall was inspired by parents’ experience with elevators. Apparently, many complained that they often had problems getting their kids to stop pressing the illuminated elevator buttons, and this inspired designers to create a special place where kids could push the buttons as much as they wanted, and now the bad news for compulsive button pressers, the Shimada Denki Seisakusho tours are already fully booked until June next year, wait a second, my laptop has just stopped working, I think I will press all 4 of these keys on the laptop at the same time, and see if that works.


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