One of my big interests in life is design. (I might have written something quite similar to this before, but my memory is poor and I really dig the subject so here goes...). Good design makes me happy and poor design can really make me loose all confidence in the species called Homo sapiens sapiens. Most of the stuff you encounter fall in the huge grey area in-between, they do their job but not with splendour. And I have a hard time figuring out why, it should not be so hard to put in just a little bit more thought and testing before finalizing a product. Some of the things that has occupied my brain recently are:
Plastic CD casings. Who the hell designed the first prototype? The hinges are so fragile that they break if you just breath on them. The plastic nubs in the middle that are supposed to keep the CD secure, they break for no reason at all and then the disk just flaps around in the casing. That problem is multiplied by a thousand if you consider the 2-disk models. (These are just a couple of my hang-ups). So, who the hell designed the first model? And who the hell thought 'Yes! This is it. This is what the casings should be like for our new music media. They look sturdy and resilient. Or maybe not, but it is not like a lot of drunken people will throw them all over the room at parties'. And How the hell can the design have survived for so long (the design that is, the casings do not survive for very long). I do not get it.
The way that the power cord is connected to a MacBook. A magnet holds the cord in place, so if you stumble upon it it just comes loose instead of sending the computer crashing to the floor. It is simply beautiful.
The TV image format. I want to see my tv in a format that keeps a square looking like a square. That should be the default setting. If that means that I get black stripes at the sides or over and under the image, so be it. I absolutely do not want the image to be stretched a little at the sides (and not stretched in the middle) so that the entire screen is filled, it makes me nauseous. (There might be TV's out there that handle this in a good way, but our set does not).
Speaking of TV's, just a word on digital boxes. I want to be able to quickly zapp between channels. Maybe it is stupid, but that is what I like. The boxes that I have so-far encountered takes more than a second to switch between channels. Why the fuck would a digital apparatus made in the year 2010 need that huge amount of time to do something so trivial?
DVD casings. Now as durability goes they are vastly superior to their CD counterparts, but why are they so huge? They must be at least fifty times as large as the disk that they contain. (Compare them to the cardboard boxes that video cassettes comes in).
Various household appliances. How hard can it be to make the controls for microwave-ovens/washers/ovens simple and intuitive to use? Bloody fucking hard it seems.
By the way, why in hell does the stove 'on' light light up when you turn the stove on even if the child-safety switch is on and hence the stove is not on? Why? Why oh why?
Sometimes I really regret that I did not consider studying industrial design when I went to college. I think I would have been good at it. I think I would have enjoyed it. Or maybe I would just have been stressed by the deadlines and money restraints and pushed out poor design that people would loath and that I would have hated myself for. Who knows?
a blog about nothing
1 comment:
It is never "too late" to learn. I visited the lab of the industrial design school in Umeå once. Lots of cool stuff! :)
By the way, I can shed some light on the digital TV box issues I think. Not so much bad design as bad engineering. Actually, it is not even the engineers' fault, more of a control / economy thing. The digital TV is compressed and you need a buffer of a certain length to uncompress it. When you change channels the buffer gets flushed and needs to be refilled with the new content. So, we have to wait. Sucks, but who needs TV??
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