Instances of good design
This is the Ashtanur pencil case. Once you see it, you can’t help wanting one: it is simply too cool!
So I got one, and here it is.
These are made by two designers, my friend Ido Mohar and Baruch Mogilevsky, in mimicry of the local flat pita bread – called Ashtanur in Jerusalem, but Laffa in Tel Aviv (Ahh… what do those Tel Avivians know?!…) They’re made of printed fabric, but the similarity to a folded flat pita with fallafel inside is uncanny. You can get one at Etsy.
Every seasoned traveler knows the drill: you go to baggage claim, everyone’s bags arrive except yours, and you start running around to try and locate it. If you’re lucky, you end up finding your suitcase standing, forlorn and confused, with a few other bags in some corner or another. How it got there nobody can tell, and you don’t ask.
Imagine my delight when I saw, in Newark airport (if memory serves!) this elegant setup. All the orphaned bags were collected in one place, safely locked but visible to all, so you could claim them with ease.
Good idea!
Here are the headlamps of two Mazda cars. On the left, a Mazda 323 from the first half of the past decade, the other a Mazda 3 from the second half. Both fine family cars.
See the difference in design strategy?
The car on the left has the headlamp split into two parts. The one on the right uses a single assembly.
Why do I care? Because when either lamp gets broken in an accident – and for the outer, the turn signal, this can be even a minor scrape – you need only replace one small cover in the older car, and the entire large assembly in the new one. An assembly they will charge you a ridiculously high sum for.
And yes, some may find the newer design more aesthetic; but the modern highway is a battlefield, not an art museum. We’re better off with cars designed with repair cost in mind. But then, it’s easy to conjecture that that’s what they are – just not in the owner’s interests…
Form, they say, follows function… which leads to many utilitarian everyday products. But every now and then you run into a design detail that shows inspired abuse of this principle: some unknown designer decides that the product also needs to be lovely, or unconventional, or humorous.
Here’s an example I’ve come across: a drain cover in a very basic drinking fountain.
They could have made this piece the usual way, with regular slits or holes. But the designer felt this circle of funny fishes trying to eat each other will be more pleasing to the thirsty user.
It was pleasing to me – and I wish the anonymous designer with the sense of humor all the best!
Now, I hate litigation, and like many would rather have companies focus on innovating for the greater good; also, I happen to like Android a lot. Nevertheless, I think many criticizers of Apple in its recent victory over Samsung are missing a key point.
The argument goes, Apple sued Samsung for producing smartphones that are rectangular and with rounded corners – how lame is that?!
Yes, that is lame. But Apple also sued about many other alleged infringements, including the application in a handheld device of multi-touch gesture input – the now ubiquitous “pinch to zoom, flick to scroll” kind of user interface that we all love. And that is a whole different story – one that is hardly lame…
I remember well my first encounter with an iPhone. I remember the feeling of wonder, the ecstasy of experiencing this incredible UI paradigm. It was a revelation, a true revolution, on a par with the first appearance of the mouse-based WIMP interface (which, as an ironic aside, Apple seems to have copied from Xerox for the Lisa and Macintosh computers in the early 80s). It was pure innovation, and with it Apple enabled the very concepts of Mobility and Computing that we all benefit from today.
And that is what Samsung – and Android – had taken from Apple. The overall concept, the basic paradigm, that the iPhone embodies. And yes, I too would have preferred that Apple adopt a more open mind about sharing their technology, but that is not my choice to make. Until they do, let no one say that they’re a bunch of spoiled, un-innovative, litigious whiners suing about the rectangle with round corners. I really think we all do owe them more respect than that!
The intense pressure of natural selection has given us many magnificent examples of optimized design in nature. Here is a lovely case: the dentition of Heterodontus Portusjacksoni, the Port Jackson shark. I saw these jaws at a nature museum and just had to snap a photo…
This shark has unusual teeth – none of the flesh-ripping daggers that the “Jaws” movie brought to fame (while giving sharks a bad name that may help drive them to extinction). It feeds on mollusks, and uses the tiny spiked teeth in front to grab them and the blunt ones in the back to crush them.
But what I found most appealing is the geometrical structure of the entire set, which has a mathematical elegance and hints at a similarly elegant growth mechanism. One can imagine that the whole complexity of these teeth is generated in one continuous process governed by a very simple equation. Just like a fractal…
Math and nature and beauty, all in one chunk of bone! 
Those depressing multi-story parking structures are an unavoidable part of a driver’s life… and they can get quite annoying when you need to find your way out of one. Sure, there are signs. Here, for example, is one garage that takes no chances on our missing the exit, and advertises it bilingually and redundantly:
The only problem is, it fails to say whose exit it is to the right: pedestrians or cars? This is a very common sort of confusion in such car parks, since cars and people exit them from quite different places.
So here is the right way of doing it! The sign to the right (found on another level of the same car park, strangely enough) leaves no doubt whatsoever: cars should exit to the right. I don’t remember if they had a similarly unambiguous sign for pedestrians, though those are usually marked with a running person for safety reasons. Anyway, isn’t this simple sign design convention something that every parking structure in the world should have?
A friend pointed me at this image, which seems to have gone viral online:
Now, this is pretty hilarious as a joke, but there are some serious comments it brings to mind.
First, the “normal” laundry instructions use icons instead of words, but unless you’re a laundry expert these convey no universally obvious meaning (the leftmost one in this image excepted, but that one uses text). This reinforces an earlier post on this blog: pictographic instructions are not always a good idea!
More important: the reference to mother’s knowledge is something no manufacturer would ever use in an instruction sheet, but it makes a whole lot of sense: sometimes the best way to access knowledge is by relying on others. Depending on the subject, you can learn a great deal from your mother (or father), from your coworkers, from your boss, from your friends… a process that throughout most of human history was the preferred method. Mother would teach daughter how to care for a baby (or, yes, do the laundry), father would teach son how to sow, or fish, or hunt, tribe elders would pass on the group’s history and lore… as the Beatles said: “Though she was born a long, long time ago – your mother should know!”
And even today, much knowledge is moved around this way. And many young people do ask their parents for advice; the parents in turn benefit from their kids’ expertise in other areas. No one, incidentally, reads the manufacturer manuals! These would get much better results if instead of the reams of multilingual safety appendices that everyone ignores they’d simply say “as to how to use this device safely – you really want to ask your Dad!”…
Back then we had the Palm Pilot. It had a gray lo-res screen and minimal capabilities. No wireless, no GPS, no games, just basic PDA funcfions. Compared to the android phone I use now it was like a stone ax. And yet, that old Palm had a key attribute that is long lost: simplicity of use.
A prime example: the “EDIT” button. Take the common task of modifying a memo or appointment. In Android, you have to open the item, and then hit EDIT to enter a mode where you can make your changes. And when you’re done you hit SAVE. Makes sense? Not really. In PalmOS you opened the item and just started typing. Edit mode and View mode were one and the same. Just like a sheet of paper: you can read it and you can write on it as you wish.
It may look like simple matter, but all those extra clicks do add up and clutter the user experience; what’s more, they detract from elegance – that intangible element which calls for keeping it simple!
I was in the campus of the Academic College of Tel Aviv and l noticed a little courtyard with a nice deck and some garden furniture. What caught my eye was that the chairs were tilted against the tables.
The reason became obvious when I saw one chair that had remained upright: it had a puddle of rainwater in its elegantly concave seat.
At first I was annoyed by what seemed an obvious design flaw: surely a small hole drilled in the middle of the seat would have solved this issue – what a stupid way to design an outdoors chair! Then I realized that these were no outdoors products. They were regular chairs that someone had probably repurposed for garden use in sunnier times, proving that one should be more careful with ignoring a product’s spec.
And then I noted a little round mark on the bottom of each seat, in just the location I would’ve drilled that missing hole in. Evidently, the manufacturer had foreseen the dual use of this plastic chair, and had prepared to provide for both uses. Still, the end user had used the wrong version – and had neglected to correct the problem, which a minute with a drill would have easily done.
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