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76 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2019 It has been a long time since I was in school— so long, in fact, that it was still called "junior high school" instead of "middle school" like it is today. Because it has been a while, I don't remember every single detail of what went on during those days. I remember a lot of the teachers, some of the classes, a few of the events, and of course, all of the girls I had crushes on. Other than that, it's mostly a blur. It's Such a Beautiful Day However, one thing I do remember was read- ing the sci-fi short story by Isaac Asimov called It's Such a Beautiful Day. In the story, tech- nology has progressed to the point where people use something called a "Door" (capi- tal "D") to travel in a way that was similar to Star Trek's transporter beam. The characters had stopped using reg- ular doors (lowercase "d") to venture outside because that was con- sidered a fate worse than death due to the germs, dirt, rain, mud, etc. You get the picture. Going outside was to be avoided at all costs, which was easy when you could simply step into your Door and be instantaneously trans- ported to another Door. Then, it happened. One day, the Door in the home of 12-year-old Richard Hanshaw Jr. suffered a malfunction due to a broken "field-modulator brake-valve" (you have to love 1950's sci-fi terminology). This catastrophe forced poor, young Richard to use the regular door to get to school. The problem was that once Richard took that first step outside, he enjoyed what he didn't know he had been missing. After that, he began using the regular door on a daily basis. Soon, he stopped going to school, came home late, and a couple of times, he even had traces of dirt and mud on his clothes (gasp). Before long, school staff and his mother were seri- ously concerned that he had suffered some sort of mental breakdown because of these outside journeys. In an attempt to discover the cause of this unusual neurosis, a psychologist reluctantly agreed to go outside with him to investigate. By the end of the story, the doctor was no longer concerned and explained to Richard's mother that nothing was wrong with him. The doctor came around to Richard's way of think- ing, and instead of tak- I Think I'll Go for a Walk Tim's Takeaways by Tim Haag, CONSULTANT