Given the dizzying number of options for this airport climate control system, and considering that said systems expresses feedback relatively slowly, this cluster of controllers, identical except for cryptic, label machine-produced adhesive labels and several degrees’ fluctuation in temperature, there is no way to discern which of these devices control the temperature for which areas, and knowledge of the unintuitive/unmapped is a precondition to (meaningful) action.

Consider when “bad design” is seemingly an outcome of a lack of sufficient reflection, and when, perhaps like this case, apparently “bad” design it is in fact deliberate. This may not be “bad” design so much as it is “defensive design”, made to thwart those hoping to gain knowledge of and control over a particular system without consent of the system’s nominal masters.