Archive for April, 2008

Car parts designed to smash up!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 30, 2008
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

Last year we traded in our old Clio, and got the latest model. Nice car, as before, and it looks like the design engineers at Renault have been busy thinking of ways to improve it. Like the side molding on the doors: the new car has a turn indicator lamp right inside it!

Renault Clio

Now, though they’re often touted as “decorative trim”, these moldings have a practical function: they are essentially protective bumpers that absorb the usual nicks and scratches that the side of a car suffers all too often. To put a fragile light fixture in one, where it is guaranteed to break at the first scrape with a tree or a passing car, makes about as much sense as sticking your head out the open car window on the freeway. Of course, once it gets smashed, you can sell the customer a replacement part…

Renault Clio side trim before and after damage

So there, it happened to us! The Clio got hit lightly by another car, and behold… the turn light was shattered, the rest of the molding was fine, and the authorized garage insisted they can only replace both as one piece – not just the lamp, but the entire strip, made more expensive because it contains a lamp. One look at the photo can convince you that the two are actually separate pieces – note the different color of the plastic.

But hey, business is business!

Emergent misfeatures: more than meets the eye

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 28, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

Any wise consumer checks the specification of the purchased item in the store, in order to know what he’s getting. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee a happy deal…

One day we decided to go buy a new TV set. We went to the store and selected a top notch Sony, with impressive specs. We took it home, set it up, put the resident teenagers in front of it… and they expressed major discontent!

It’s not that the picture was bad (it was crisp and vibrant), or that the sound was poor (it was excellent), or that the set failed to live up to the impressive specs on the box. The problem was that when you used the remote to channel-surf, instead of the Zap-Zap-Zap of the old TV, this one went Zapppp…… Zapppp……Zappppp… you see, the TV needed a whole second to blank the screen and bring up the next channel, making rapid switching an impossibility. You’d think a second is no big deal, but I had to agree with the kids: it completely obliterated the user experience of the surf.

Now, this is one thing I could never have foreseen. The feature list on the box did not say, “Optimized for a crummy channel surfing experience”; and having never had a TV that needed to think about obeying the remote, I never thought to check this in the store. It was an undocumented feature in the design – an emergent misfeature, if you will – that the buyer would only find out at home.

Here’s another: we have a Sharp microwave oven that has the useful habit of beeping once when the time is up. Cool. It has the slightly less useful feature of beeping again a minute later if you didn’t notice the first beep. Okay. And then it has the maddeningly stupid feature of beeping three times every minute thereafter, never relenting until you give it your attention. Hey, stupid oven, I heard you, but I’m busy right now – keep the food inside and shut up!

Again, this is an undocumented feature – one no salesman would tell and no buyer would ask, but one that delivers a major annoyance once you get the thing home. These examples showcase how the imagination of a bad designer in inventing misfeatures transcends the buyer’s ability to foresee them…

Come on, designers, have a heart!

Bialetti’s Brikka: only one extra piece!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 25, 2008
in Good design and Improvement
. 9 Comments

All coffee lovers know the classic Italian “Machinetta“, or Moka pot, that 3-piece stovetop espresso maker: not a competition to the professional espresso machine of a coffee shop, but good for a fast, concentrated caffeine fix at home. These have been around since their invention in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti, and we have a number of them at home in various sizes (hint: go for the stainless steel ones, they don’t corrode and last forever if you don’t burn the plastic handle).

But on a trip to Italy we were served by some friends with tiny portions Bialetti Brikka coffeemakerof a much stronger, foamy brew; and upon inquiring how they could produce it at home we were shown the Brikka, the machinetta with the “sbuffo” (the dictionary says “gust of wind; puff“, but a fiery snort sounds more appropriate to convey this word’s feel).

The amazing thing about the Brikka is that it is practically identical to the old Moka, except that it has one additional piece: a heavy steel cup, padded with a rubber gasket, that sits atop the tube from which, through a hole at its top, the hot coffee issues. This means that before the steam in the bottom half can push the water through the coffee powder, it has to achieve a high enough pressure to lift the steel weight; essentially the arrangement you find in a pressure cooker’s regulator valve. Once the correct pressure is reached the valve lifts and the coffee suddenly blasts through in a matter of seconds, accompanied by a loud puffing noise, much stream and bubbling foam. Sbuffo!

Brikka Sbuffo

The photos above capture the moment – mere seconds separate the two.

The Brikka, which Bialetti makes in 2-cup and 4-cup sizes (we’re talking Italian cups – about half a demitasse each), makes far stronger coffee than the Moka, and with some foam to boot. And all by adding one piece to an age-old design!

Brikka mechanism

Note the hole at the top of the tube, exposed with the weight dismantled.

Brikka compared to ordinary Moka

Brikka (right) compared to the open tube in a regular Moka style machine.

What will they think of next, you say? Don’t get me started about Bialetti’s “Mukka Express”, which seems to apply similar ideas to produce Cappuccino in one go (I’m still resisting the temptation to buy one of those).

Smart parking lot design

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 23, 2008
in Good design and Uncategorized
. 5 Comments

Parking lots try to cram as many cars in as they can (the ones that charge you to park do, anyway) and so it often happens that you exit the car only to find you’ve overstepped the white line. If you’re conscientious like me, you get back in, restart the motor and wiggle the car the few inches required to fit in your own space. The problem is that you can’t really see the lines in the last stages of the parking maneuver…

Parking lot spaces

So I was in Tel Aviv the other day and saw a simple fix to this problem. Look in the photo: they extended the white line up onto the wall! That way you can see the boundaries in front of you (or back, through the mirror) as you move in.

Handicapped parking spacesWhile they were at it, they also did the handicapped spaces – now no one can say (honestly or not) that they didn’t notice the faded symbol on the pavement; if you park in one of these spaces, it stares you right in the face.

Good thinking!

Boundary-crossing innovation: antennas in your skin!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 21, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Technology innovation often happens serendipitously, and the kind I like best is when something from one knowledge domain triggers an analogous design in a completely different field. I mean, inventing a plane with wings because you notice that birds have wings is OK, but not a huge leap (the real leap of the early aviation pioneers was ignoring the flapping of bird wings). It’s more interesting if you observe how fish swim and end up inventing sliced bread!

So, here’s one that really crosses domains. My friend Ronny – Prof. Aharon Agranat of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem – and his colleague Prof. Yuri Feldman have just made headlines with the discovery that you can read the state of sweating on human skin at a distance by beaming Sub-Terahertz waves at it and analyzing the reflected waves. This could have useful applications in a variety of fields, from medicine to security, given that sweating patterns correlate to various biomedical conditions. But the part I like is how they arrived at this development…

Ronny and Yuri were looking at new imaging data that showed that the sweat pores in the skin are not straight tubes but helical. Weird design choice??? but some antennas used for communications are also helical. So, click! – as Ronny says in an interview, “When you look at this through the eyes of an electrical engineer, it is very familiar… it immediately ignited the thinking that perhaps they also behave as helical antennas”.

Immediately, that is, if you have that innovative talent to generalize across domains boundaries!

The Eject button: Location, location, location!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 18, 2008
in Bad design and Good design
. 3 Comments

Here is our Toshiba DVD player. It works well enough, but its design does make you wonder…

I’ve already extolled its remote control’s virtues (Not). Well, here is the unit itself. You turn it on with the round button at the right; good enough. Then you look for the Eject button, to open the tray. And you look. And you look??? because it is in the wrong location.

Toshiba DVD Eject button location

The button is marked in the photo with the red arrow. The point is, that is the last place you’d look for it! It is there to open the disc tray, which is far to the left. You end up reading the button captions – and these are quite tiny and hard to discern, of course – until you find it.

To quantify the extent of this design crime, compare the DVD player with the VCR on which we have it standing. Compare the red and green arrows’ lengths. That’s the difference between Human Centric Design and… whatever it is they did on the DVD unit. See what I mean?

Eject Buttons on Toshiba DVD and on Sony VCR

LCD Monitor adjustment blues

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 16, 2008
in Bad design, Design history and Improvement
. 1 Comment

So we’ve made the move to flat computer screens, which have many advantages over their bulky CRT ancestors; but the vendors pulled a fast one on us when it comes to the controls for adjusting the screen’s image.OSD on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

In the good ol’days, every monitor had at least two round knobs, one for contrast, one for brightness. This is as good as it gets from a human engineering perspective. You just twiddle the knobs back and forth until your eyes tell your brain to tell your fingers to stop right there. Today, we have instead an On-screen Display (OSD), which some vendors tout as a good thing; in reality it is slow, unfriendly and confusing. The idea is that you use a line of pushbuttons the navigate a hierarchy of menus just to get to the function you need, and then you need to click a good deal more to effect the adjustment. To make sure this is easy, the buttons are often labeled by cryptic symbols in near-invisible relief (as in the photo below, of my Samsung SyncMaster 913N); and the logic they use, though simple, is far from intuitive. This may be justified – indeed inevitable – for accessing the numerous advanced functions that did not exist in the CRT days; but couldn’t they have left alone those more basic controls?

That’s progress for you (sigh)…

Control buttons on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

So, what can we do about this? Adding analog controls is not realistic on these super-integrated monitors. The only thing left, which actually removes much of the confusion, is to do what the vendor should have done – mark the controls with visible labels, as I’ve done:

Labbeled Control buttons on Samsung SyncMaster 913N monitor

Artsy design is not enough!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 14, 2008
in Bad design and Improvement
. 1 Comment

The trendy-looking kitchen tool in the photo, made by Koziol, is called “Mia” for some reason. Its purpose is to test Pasta: the frilly head is surprisingly adept at scooping (and holding) a few pieces of short Pasta (penne, fusilli, etc) out of the boiling water; and you use the hook at the other end to fish a strand of spaghetti. Then you can bite them to see if they’re underdone or just right (that is, “Al Dente”, not overcooked and mushy!) And the ring may be for measuring one-serving batches of uncooked spaghetti.

Koziol Mia pasta scoop

A useful little tool, addressing a real need – catching pasta in boiling water with a fork or spoon can be quite vexing. And it has a lovely zoomorphic design, like all of Koziol’s humorous, artsy kitchenware. It even has two depressions for eyes…

BUT… as it came from the store, it had one major design flaw: the deep scoop of the “head” catches not only fusilli, but also a spoonful of boiling water, which can all too easily spill on your hand as you try to grab your tasty catch. As a fishing net analogue, it has no holes!

Koziol Mia pasta scoop improved

So, what can we do about this? Sometimes, what an industrial designer messes up, we can fix by ourselves. I used a fine drill to deepen the eyes until they punched through, making excellent drainage holes without destroying Mia’s funny face.

Schizophrenic books

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 11, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

See the book on the left. It’s been around for centuries, issued by countless publishers, translated into many tongues… and no one ever doubted what it was, because it has a name: Macbeth.

Macbeth and Edison's Eve

Now see the book on the right. This is Edison’s Eve: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life, by Gaby Wood, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf. An interesting book, actually; but it has one strange aspect: the first half of the book is about the history of lifelike automata – Vaucanson’s duck, the Turk chess player, Edison’s speaking dolls and so on; just as the title promises. The second half is all about little people who appeared in circuses and sideshows in times past, such as the Doll family in the 1920s, which seems rather off-topic. The incongruity was resolved for me abruptly when I noticed a line on the copyright and catalog info page at the back of the frontispiece: “Originally published in Great Britain as Living Dolls by Faber and Faber limited, London”. Now that title makes sense and links the two parts of the book correctly.

So, we have the same book sold in two countries under different names: the original name sensible, the later poorly thought out and confusing (amazingly, the Amazon site says people who bought one also bought the other…) Nor is this a unique case: I’ve seen this with non-fiction a number of times.

I’m sure the publishers had weighty reasons for this mutilation of the book’s name: one can envision considerations of marketing, or potential lawsuits, the usual corporate stuff. But these are books; books deserve respect. You don’t rename Macbeth to “Scandal in Dunsinane”, nor to “Blood, sex and sorcery”, just because it may sell more in some country. Leave our books alone!

Car window wiper mystery

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 9, 2008
in Bad design
. 10 Comments

This one has been bothering me for years: why don’t all cars have rear window wipers?

Typically station wagons, hatchbacks and all sorts of minivans and SUVs have one; but ordinary four-door cars almost never do. Yet the need is identical: why, then, discriminate against these?

If you have a good answer, post it in the comments!