The lights in my house force me to go through something similar to Schlemiel the painter’s problem. It is located at the entrance to the living room. The problem is that the entrance to the bedrooms is on the other side, so when I’m going to bed, I have to walk back to the other side of the room in order to turn off the lights, and then walk back in the dark into my bedroom. While I appreciate the physical exercise (and memory exercise for remembering where all my furniture are so I don’t trip over them), it surely wasn’t a design goal for the location of the light switch.
This problem could benefit from duplication. In fact, my previous apartment had exactly this. Two light switches, one at each end of the living room. you enter from the doorway through the living room and exit to the bedrooms. This let me turn off the lights as I exit a room rather than forcing me to turn off the lights from the other side of the room then walking the rest of the way in the dark.
I say duplication, some would say redundancy, but redundancy implies that the second copy is useless. That’s not the case. Duplicating things can improve reliability. Harddrives in the RAID configuration improve reliability by storing the same data in two or more seperate harddrives at the same time. If one of the harddrives fail, there’s another copy readily available. The topology of the internet relies on DNS. DNS servers are duplicated around the world to mitigate the chance of a DoS attack that would bring down the internet.
You might duplicate your house keys in case you lose a set. Accountants record a transaction twice in two seperate places to help prevent fraud and human errors. A deduction from one account must be followed by an equal and opposite addition into another. (I believe that’s the third law of accounting or something). Websites duplicate links on the same page so people find things easier. You’re duplicating information when you put todo list items on both your calendar and your diary to help you remember them.
Duplicates improve convenience and reliability. The person who designed the lights in my apartment failed to do the former.
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