a ticket counter held by a San Francisco MUNI ticket assistant/checker

The mechanical ticket counters above are worked by an old gentleman who waits at a MUNI tram stop in the morning and hands out tickets to commuters before their tram arrives, so as not to overload the driver and create a payment queue on the steps of the vehicle. I didn't have time to take a detailed set of photographs, but it appears that one of the counters is used to track normal tickets, and the other to track (cheaper) ones sold to seniors.

Note the construction: two separate devices lashed together and to a roughly machined acrylic sheet with rubber-bands and cable ties. Also note how the counter buttons are on the same side (because they're identical), necessitating placing one below the other so as not to block access, and forcing left-handed use; presumably they were not designed for this use by what appears to be the International Register Co. This is either a hack by the ticket seller to make accounting easier, or something issued by the transportation company and

1. fixed later by the ticket seller or someone like him
2. in the original state of construction, but conceived and constructed to accomodate new categories (seniors?) or roles (ticket sellers at the bus stands to help increase throughput for an increased commuter population?)
3. in the original state of construction and conceived & constructed to a plan (“here's how we'll help our new ticket sellers keep track of how much money they should have at the end of their shift”)

In any case, the categories in use (‘adult’ and ‘senior’) have become reified in the construction of this equipment, which is only necessary because there are two categories. If there was only one kind of ticket, the ticket seller could simply note the serial number of the first ticket and multiply the ticket price by the difference from the last serial number left at the end of the shift (with minor procedural modifications in the case of multiple ticket books having been consumed). With two categories, however, accounting becomes a little harder, especially when people queue up for tickets fast. Note how the ticket seller has a cache of tickets cut to the correct time cut-offs to make it easy to hand out tickets quickly.

While this is a technology for accounting, it is not necessarily a technology for accountability (whereas a electronic ticket vending machine could do both). One would guess that fully electronic ticketing in the Promised Land of Ubicomp would obviate the need for this hack. In case this is a grassroots innovation, it shows how policies from above collide with the messiness of processes as they are actually carried out, making people create work-arounds in response.

The lesson? Categories & processes interact: if you create or change categories, you might possibly be affecting processes downstream somewhere, and someone might have to invent a way of dealing with it. So before you create personas & segmentations, pause and think about what they'll make people do, and what they are for: accounting or accountability?

(Now would be a good time to read Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification & its Consequences. Complex, detailed, but much recommended, especially if you want an interesting perspective on why health insurance costs are so high).