Design Decisions to Die For
A couple of months ago I explored the subject of the best teapot in the world, and why it was a stainless steel version made for an ocean liner in the 1950s.
And I still wonder whether the strange Rampant Rabbit design of a Philippe Starck teapot tells us more about the man himself, or simply shows that somebody else pours his cuppa.
Yesterday I met the opposite end of the spectrum, in the form of the garden waste dustbin from my local council.
Unfortunately for the reader, that has set off an opposite train of thought about designs which deserve the death penalty.
And I am particularly exercised by tiny changes, the smallest of changes, which would have been trifles for the designer, but where there has simply not been any thought.
A Dusty reception for a Bin
A pair of wheelie bins, one for recyclings, one for garden waste, of the type which infest driveways from Penzance to Perth. These examples are in the Midlands.
- Not ‘Bin Thinkin’
What’s missing?
The one on the right was designed, commissioned, purchased, and imposed by someone who has never had to open a gate while pulling a wheelie bin with one hand, has never had a weak (or amputated) arm, has never had to use a mobility aid while moving a bin, has never had to pull two bins at the same time, has never had to move a bin while carrying something else, and has perhaps never had a driveway more than 25 metres long.
Spot the difference?
A little bit of plastic is missing, to allow the bin to be pulled along in the middle of the handle.
The irony is that – to my eye – the design on the right looks a little more complicated (and expensive) to manufacture and more likely to break.
Safety Features behind the Danger
Imagine a fire on your cooker.
If you are in Clapham faux Ruritania let it be wholemeal toast which has caught fire on the Aga Tennis-Racket toaster. If you are in the North or in Salmond-land let it be a chip pan (or deep-fried Mars Bar) fire. And if you are in York let it be a petrol fire because somebody is decanting petrol in the kitchen with the cooker running.
In any case imagine the master off-switch for the cooker.
The one that you want to switch off when something dangerous happens.
Where do you suppose it likely to be placed until relatively recently?
Brown Betty Teapots
- Naughty Teapot
We’re back to teapots, and tea.
And we’re back to civilised teapots and refined tea because we are dealing with tealeaves rather than teabags.
And the spout, delivering tea to your cup, exiting the teapot exactly at the point where the tealeaves are located.
It was probably designed by a manufacturer of tea strainers.
There’s no shortage of others, starting with electronic forms which insist on being filled in by hand.
But, as per Sad’s post earlier, I can hear the garden, the sun and the deckchair calling.
And unfortunately I have to go and paint a ceiling.
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1
May 19, 2012 at 15:14 -
“Designing” was long ago replaced with “Styling”.
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May 19, 2012 at 15:21 -
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May 19, 2012 at 15:26 -
Your wheelie-bin has another design flaw. It has a depression towards the rear of the lid which collects a small pond of rainwater.
On lifting the lid, this malevolent moisture immediately deposits itself into the bin, thus wetting all the contents, causing many of them to adhere to the sides and thus fail to empty whenever the bin-machine lifts it, in addition to causing the bin-wagon to carry an additional load of heavy water and wet material to its depot, thus increasing transport costs (and probably slaying a few polar bears too).
And yes, I’ve got one of that ‘design’ – cheap and nasty – the lid may appear more complex a moulding but that complexity is merely there to introduce some strength into the inferior material from which it is moulded. But I’m sure it was 10p a unit cheaper than the other type…..
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May 20, 2012 at 13:39 -
Actually the water doesn’t run into the bin as the hinges are extended. It runs onto your stomach and legs when you attemp to tilt and wheel the bin – I have one!
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May 19, 2012 at 20:07 -
Why did the designer of your preferred single handle design assume that the people who fell into your categories had smaller hands than the majority of the population who were able to use the outer handles? Otherwise the handle supports would have been equidistantly sited on the bin body.
The new handle design is stronger and the breakage of a hinge pin requires the replacement of a smaller component.
A hook handle like this could bridge the gap if needed. Or a similar device could be fabricated from a wire coathanger. -
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May 19, 2012 at 20:33 -
Don’t get me started on ‘designers’. I’ve had to try and rectify too many bad designs in the engineering world to think much of them.
For example, the time a new designer was employed – he had very good pieces of paper – to design a very expensive editing table for 35mm movie film and sound tape. He did reasonably well until someone pointed out that the unit was too big. He ‘fixed’ it by telling the CAD program to make it smaller. The drawings went off to the die makers – very expensive – and eventually the casting went to the machine shop. It was then I got called in – holes that should have been 99.8 mm diameter were in fact 80 mm and there just wasn’t enough metal to drill them out to the correct size. Yes, we did work out a way to salvage the very, very expensive machine but that ‘designer’ never worked for that company again.
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May 19, 2012 at 20:49 -
Good gracious, Ivan, you’re old enough to remember 35mm editing tables … ? [16 & 17,5 mm sound]. We have to meet
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May 19, 2012 at 21:13 -
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May 19, 2012 at 22:40 -
Editing tables? Nasty things. Moviolas were the machines proper film editors used.
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May 20, 2012 at 11:01 -
Even they turned to flat tables in the late 60s – only problem they were a complete PITS to maintain.
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11
May 20, 2012 at 01:02 -
The teapot pictured, when poured slowly, actually filters out both scum & tea leaves. It’s a brilliantly simple design requiring no fragile mesh filters.
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May 20, 2012 at 03:05 -
Just lately I’ve been pondering that there is no such thing as traffic engineering in the UK, just a set of often contradicting rules that are blindly applied.
A couple of examples, one old and one a lot newer. Consider a long, one way street. What DON’T you want to happen? Vehicles going the wrong way of course. So we have a pair of ‘No Entry’ signs at the ‘exit’ end and that is the extent of the protection. Going the right way there can be a multidude of confirmation arrows but to what purpose? Fear that the right-hand lane might not be used? Have you used a signalled pedestrian crossing lately? The older ones had a ‘green man’ signal high up so that pedestrians crossing can see it and road vehicles can’t. Supposedly pedestrians just look straight ahead and ‘cross on green’ and get killed. So the new ones have a ‘green man’ low down at right-angles to the pedestrian flow. The result is that the pedestrians don’t know where to look and even if they do it is blocked by the person to your right. Meanwhile the people who can see it best of all are the approaching car drivers on the far side lane who get a distracting ‘green’ signal just when the should be seeing a ‘red’ one. I use one of these crossings twice a week and most people leap out across the road the moment they think the traffic is stopping. Unfortunately it is sited at a three-way junction and stopped crossing traffic can suddenly be replaced by turning traffic from the sideroad.
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May 20, 2012 at 07:28 -
Ooooh! Editing tables! Anyone who has ever accessed the IWM’s archive film collection will know the pleasure of ‘driving’ the big Steenbeck desks in the Lambeth Road film annexe; the pleasures of ‘spooling up’, centring the rollers and then the accelerator lever to 3/4 speed – slow – stop – back and insert a fag paper in the film reel at the start and end of the bits you wanted transferred to Betacam … but that’s an aside.
The bane of my working life is architects who want to design their own bespoke version of a scheme component that’s otherwise readily available off the shelf; I even had one who wanted to design their own version of RW downpipe in a curious rectangular section. “No.” said I “Not unless you come up with hydrodynamic tests, flow rates, turbulence tests and full CE / BS certification all for the same cost as the proven square section stuff off the shelf. I’m not buying something untested and designed by someone who hasn’t a clue what they’re doing, and the developer’s money is going in securing a usable building, not some design experiment for your portfolio”. Cue variants of same lecture to the architects on just about every single job I’ve managed.
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May 20, 2012 at 09:43 -
How many times do you hear: ‘have you seen my new bottle opener/coffeemaker/beanstringer; whatever?’….. Which when you try out said device, unsuccessfully, gets the inevitable: ‘no, no, you’re doing it wrong; there’s a knack to it’
But then; my H & G Simonds Ltd bottle opener, PT 466444, Rd 811274; one small forging, older than I am- still opens my beer perfectly. -
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May 20, 2012 at 10:00 -
As a mature student, I recently completed a degree course in the department of design in a northern university. There we were routinely exposed to the emperor’s new clothes bollocks of the likes of Starck (natch), Alessi (check out your local mega-expensive kitchen shop for examples of his tacky oeuvre), Bedine, and many others. But all ‘icons’, of course.
But my favourite is a ‘Carlton’ bookcase by Ettore Sottsass: check it out at http://www.detnk.com/node/8993 . Saatchi would be proud.
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May 20, 2012 at 17:27 -
That bookcase is GREAT! I hadn’t seen it before [nobody is perfect] and I am definitely going to get a carpenter to make me a copy.
I don’t very much appreciate Alessi either, but I adore and have his spiral ashtrays:
http://www.alessi.com/en/3/327/home-accessories/spirale-ashtrayI do buy his stuff as presents for friends, who like it, though. So I once bought a [very expensive] Alessi metal breadbasket for their wedding. A few months later they came home after a nice long evening out, only to find their wonderful DIY renovated farmhouse turned into a heap of smoking ashes [electrical short-circuit – I’d told him that some things should be left to an electrician…]. Anyway, the ONLY thing that had survived the fire and only needed a bit of cleaning was … the Alessi breadbasket
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May 20, 2012 at 17:34 -
I wish that the label ‘DESIGNER’ wasn’t used when referring to the ‘STYLISTS’ who were responsible for these. I am an electronic hardware and system design engineer and together with my software and meachanical design colleagues I DESIGN things. Sometimes I suffer from those STYLISTS who really should never be allowed away from their play-school coloured felt-tip pens. As SMBL says, the results of letting a stylist design a UI are normally lamentable.
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May 20, 2012 at 17:37 -
I’ve just had a look at the bookcase. A certain charm I suppose, especially if you like homespun rural naïve art.
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May 20, 2012 at 19:13 -
I’m a bit out of touch on prices, but they were making about £5 to 15 grand (depending on ‘edition’) at auction.
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May 20, 2012 at 20:05 -
I would be interested which and where auctions. Cheaper to buy than to have manufactured. You may not be able to imagine what it looks like WITH books
And no, of course, I wouldn’t put a Rietveld chair next to it or some Jacobson chairs series 7 … but … then again … I might
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May 20, 2012 at 21:22 -
About 80 years ago, some clever German invented the “Jerry Can”. It is still in used worldwide- with almost no changes. And one of the cleverest features is the design of the three handles. If you are strong enough to do so, you can carry the full 20kg by the centre one. If not, then two people lift it using the outer pair.
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