I was visiting an office where they had one of these delightful Espresso machines, an Espresso Point by Lavazza, and tried to make me a cup.
I put in a paper cup and a coffee cartridge, pushed the button at the right of the panel next to the size I wanted, and instead of that steaming coffee, I got a blinking red light at the left (marked below with an arrow).
I tried to puzzle the meaning of this light. It had the icon you see, with a coffee cup and an X. What did it mean? Obviously in a large beverage dispensing machine it would stand for “I’m out of cups”; but this machine did not store cups. It might mean “You forgot to put in the cup” – only I hadn’t. What else? “Smash a cup before I agree to make coffee”?
After much futile experimentation a local came and said “Oh, the machine is out of water”, and she proceeded to pour some in at the top. I could finally enjoy my coffee.
But what a stupid design choice… the cup with the X has no relation to missing water; and indeed, the fact that the cup looks identical to those in the icons at the right side of the panel only reinforces the mis-interpretation.
Shame on you, Lavazza designers!
In a world of rapidly advancing technology it is the fate of any given product to go down from the latest and greatest to a commodity in a few years. The fancy box my first electronic calculator came in probably cost more to make than an entire calculator costs today – and today’s unit, though far more powerful, is sold in an ignominious blister package…
I found a good illustration of such a trend when putting in order some of the accumulated techno-junk in my basement. A load of old software backups allowed me to view a history of the packaging of a once excellent innovation, the soon to be forgotten 3.5-inch micro-floppy disk.
When these rigid diskettes hit the market in the early eighties, popularized by the original Mac and Amiga computers, they were a great improvement over their flimsier 5.25-inch predecessors. They were also expensive enough to warrant packaging in very nice cardboard boxes, ones that would double as easy to browse diskette libraries. Like this elaborate package by Maxell:
Then prices inched lower, and by the nineties Maxell made the same product in this box, which was a tad harder to flip the disks in but was made of two cardboard parts instead of the earlier three:
And lastly, in the previous decade and up till their gasping breath when flash sticks drove them out entirely, floppies were downgraded to the cheapest one-piece box type possible, as seen below.
Thus passes the glory of the world…
