I was in an appliance store and noticed a stack of boxes containing Kenwood mixers. All other appliances were in ugly white or brown cardboard boxes with some text printed on them; but these mixers were housed in sleek boxes like this:
This immediately rang a bell: I’ve seen this sort of super-trendy, designer-look packaging before. Of course I have: Apple Computer has been selling their cool products in them for some time! Looks like Apple’s influence on product design, which I’ve remarked on before, is extending to the packaging world too; and if you have any doubt, look at the name of the mixer near the top of the box. Used to be that mixers were called names like Kitchen Chef or Model M-2398A; but this one is called a kMix, no less! Small wonder that the box has the hallmarks of the packaging of an iPod, or an iPhone, as seen below!
Photo courtesy astroot, shared on flickr under CC license.
Apple Computer’s incredibly talented design team has had a major influence on the design of contemporary mobile electronics: just visit a cellular phone store and you’ll see how all the companies are scrambling to copy the iPhone’s sleek look and feel, both the hardware and the software.
Well, apparently this influence goes beyond mobile devices. Today I was at a home appliance store, and to my amazement I saw the apparition in this photo. It is, clearly, a refrigerator; but its front looks exactly like an iPhone, from the black glass of the doors to the brushed metal band around them.
Apple is certainly not stopping at dominating the cellphone and computer markets. One must wonder what will come next? iPhone-like cars? Or maybe iPad-like Buildings? 
Many small appliances can benefit from an off-device mains switch, and these are often put on the power cable, or – more rarely – on the wall outlet. But in a trip to Germany I witnessed a nice twist on this theme: putting the switch right on the 220V mains plug at the end of the cable. This was done without in any way increasing the size of the standard plug; and of course it means you could retrofit such switches to any device by replacing a plug, a simpler operation than replacing a wall outlet or messing with the cable in between the device and the plug. Nice product!
We needed a standing lamp for the living room, and went shopping. We started with some of the larger lighting stores around town, and found a great many lamps, mostly imported from China. Like most manufactured goods today they were inexpensive and looked like they would do the job – for a while. The workmanship was usually shoddy and of course there was nobody to tell that I prefer the on/off switch to be just at this height, and I need a longer electric cord, and would love it if the lampshade were just a bit wider…
After a while we were beginning to consider compromising, but decided to first try Karl Marx. This is a small old style shop in downtown Jerusalem; it has been there forever, and I never entered it, though it did attract my occasional amused glance because of the coincidence of its founder’s name.
The shop occupied a tiny room crammed so tight with lamps and lampshades that one could barely stand in it (the photo doesn’t begin to convey this). And there we found a lamp we liked, which we could get with any shade we wished, because they’re made to order by the owners; in fact, we were guided courteously through all the possibilities and ordered one decorated to our specification with a frieze in a color and style to match our living room rug. And of course they promised to construct it with the switch where I wanted it, the cord the needed length, and so forth. The quality and workmanship, too, were perfect.
This is one of those old fashioned Mom and Pop businesses that represent the skill and dedication of a lifetime (or more), and produce goods handmade to a standard no longer seen in the mass-produced disposable products that flood the large chains. I should be sad discussing it, because these wonderful shops are fast disappearing; but I’m too delighted in the excellent lamp Messrs. Marx made for us!
A few days ago I saw this interesting setup on the wall in a medical center.
Obviously, this is the solution to the world’s energy needs. No more greenhouse emissions, no need for nuclear power plants, no oil shortages… just a clean, compact, self-contained electrical version of the classic Perpetuum Mobile.
The sign, in case you’re rusty on your Hebrew, says “Please don’t press the switch. “. An most reasonable request – interrupting the flow of free electricity would certainly not do…
A couple of weeks ago we saw a poorly designed twin mains socket. Whoever designed that one wasn’t very bright, but he was a genius compared to the person who mounted the socket strip we see here:
I found this setup in an office building. Ignore the shoddy execution of the cable conduit below, but ask yourself, what was this electrician thinking, when he mounted the power strip in this specific position above the conduit?!
If the issue isn’t obvious to you, The photo at right shows where the problem is. This one goes beyond poor design, beyond incompetence, to open entire new vistas of poor craftsmanship.
Here are two mains power sockets from around our home. One is a standard grounded 220V socket. The second is obviously much better: in the same space, for the same trouble, it takes two plugs! In the USA this is of course standard practice; all wall socket panels have two sockets. Here, though, this is less common, perhaps because our plugs are larger. So – isn’t that twin socket neat?
Well, it would have been, if the designer had been thinking. You can see the problem in the next photo: most grounded mains plugs have the cable coming out the side – and this means the second socket in this panel is obstructed by this cable. All it would take to fix this is to build the panel the other way around, with the ground connections on the outside rather than facing the center, or better yet, place the two plugs side by side with the cables going down towards the floor. Cost and complexity of production would have been identical; usefulness would have doubled.
Shame!
Our kitchen light fixture started to char its plastic housing, so we went and bought a new China-made one, equipped with two concentric fluorescent lamps like its predecessor. It was only later, after much climbing ladders and drilling holes overhead, that the problem appeared: try as we might, fitting the two lamps seemed impossible to do. Then it became clear that it actually was impossible!
The fixture had three equidistant radial arms to place the lamps on, and these each had metal protrusions to locate the neon rings in position. The problem was, no matter how we pushed and bent, the smaller ring would simply not fit – its diameter was wrong. Note that the two lamps came in the same fitted cardboard box with the fixture, right from the manufacturer!
At first we were so upset we decided to replace the contraption; but it then struck me that as it hangs there with off-center skewed rings it does have a retro charm reminiscent of the Googie style (think Jetsons or retro Sci Fi ray gun designs). So for now, the lamp stays. Still it does boggle the mind that they’d sell a lamp that can’t be assembled, as if by design.
One day the ladies in the household decided they’ve had it with our handheld hairdryer, which was indeed weak and ailing. So I went to buy a new one, and decided to follow my first principle for tool acquisition: always buy the most professional, high-quality tool you can afford – it will repay the expense many times over!
I asked the appliance store guy for his best tool, and he offered me a sturdy blue unit that, he said, was what professional hairdressers (sorry, hair styling artists) use. The wattage on the label was indeed higher than any I’ve seen before. I brought it home proudly, only to discover the next day that it was no good to anyone there.
This was a new one for me: how can a tool that professionals prefer be useless to an amateur? In my world of engineering and DIY projects, this would be unthinkable. What difference can it make? A hairdryer is a hairdryer, after all.
Here’s the difference: the hairdryer is a hairdryer, but the hairdresser uses it to dry hair that is on someone else’s head! When you dry your own hair, the dryer must be short enough to fit between your hand and your skull; when you dry someone else you can just step back. The professional tool was longer, not much but just enough to make it awkward to use on oneself.
So, a lesson: always keep an open mind and challenge your own assumptions on the way a design fits its intended use. These errors seem obvious in retrospect – always in retrospect…
And now, from the murky past, a serious lapse in designing for the intended user…
When my son was a toddler, many years ago, he had this habit of going into my den in my absence, climbing onto the lab bench and wreaking havoc (here, I once captured him on film reaching for a hammer).
Well, I had to protect kid and gear, and I had this idea to build an anti-toddler alarm system that would raise an alert if the kid went into the den without an accompanying adult. My design had two infrared beams crossing the door at different heights, and a control box complete with a cackle generator (to issue a sound like an angry hen when the alarm was triggered). When it was finished, I painstakingly built four lens assemblies for the IR beams, rigged them around the door frame, and prepared to have some fun. Cool, huh?…
Yah. The thing lasted for less than a day. As soon as the kid (did I say he’s very smart?) went on the prowl he spied the interesting new things on the door frame, decided they were worth studying, and tore them off the door to facilitate examination. I wasn’t in the mood to devise hardened housings, so that was the end of the project.
We tend to think of User-centered design as making life easy for the user. Evidently, you also have to ensure the system can survive its intended users!
