Design Critique Part I: Things around the House

One way I know engineering and praxis have taken over my life is that more and more frequently, I take note of things I encounter in everyday life that are either nifty or inane. I then find myself evaluating the design of and trying to reverse engineer how the product was finalized. What was the intended objective? How was the idea thought of, i.e. what was the gap identified? What kind of technology is involved? What could have been some restrictions or issues that came up during the process? What were key design decisions and upon what criteria was emphasis put? Does that say anything about who the designer might be, e.g. engineer, architect, artist?

For instance, I was at the Korean supermarket the other day and saw training chopsticks—they had little handles on them like scissors and grooves to teach you the right way to hold them. I thought that was pretty cool and definitely useful, since it’s hard to teach a small child how to hold chopsticks and there are a lot of people who do some fudging and learn it the wrong way. I can’t make a really detailed critique because I didn’t get to use them—they were in packaging and I wasn’t about to buy a pair just to try them out (they weren’t that cheap!)—but I tried to make the general shape my hand would form and it seemed to be correct. They also looked pretty durable and kid-friendly—the plastic was of a decent thickness and there was a variety of different colour patterns so that kids could pick their favourite colour. All in all, a nice balance of everything, definitely well engineered.

And who doesn’t love bag clips? I didn’t know they existed until this past summer when I was shopping for university (we don’t use them at home). I dare say it’s one of the most useful little pieces of plastic ever invented. Someone realized along the line that it would be far simpler to preserve food by closing the existing packaging back up: it’s hassle-free and completely reusable, as opposed to Ziploc bags which can’t be used over and over again or a container you’d have to wash every time you wanted to put something new in. And it’s cheap—you can get a whole bagful for a dollar or something similarly ridiculous. Not the most difficult thing ever to make, but major kudos to whoever managed to think of the obvious—keeping it simple is often harder to do (ask any EngSci).

As another example, take the new Tropicana juice carton cap. They recently switched from the standard disk-like shape to a hemisphere resembling the outside of an orange. At first glance, it’s a nice little touch—little half-orange, orange juice, get it? But then you try to set it down on the table face-up (so as not to contaminate the lid if the surface you’re putting it on isn’t exactly clean—yay for residence life—so it rolls around and the rim ends up touching the surface anyway. You can’t really get a good grip on it either when you’re trying to screw it on or off, because they made the surface smooth for aesthetic purposes. I also think it probably ended up being more costly to manufacture—they would have had to come up with new custom moulds as opposed to the run-of-the-mill ones you can find virtually everywhere, and changing parts of an established assembly line can’t have been easy. Clearly, looking pretty took precedence over practicality and in this case (I’m inclined to extend this conclusion to most cases but that may just be my bias talking) it was not the way to go.

Sometimes, I don’t have the technical background to be able to fully analyze a given product. I’d love to find out exactly how Swiffer products work—it can’t all be about static cling, and what kind of materials are they anyway (and to what degree are they really disposable, i.e. biodegradable in a few years or dumpster fodder for the next century)? There’s also this neat acoustic amplifier for the iPhone that I bought my friend a couple months ago as a birthday present: it uses a “coiled waveguide ‘horn’”—yay resonance! ... I think?—to amplify the sound by about 10 decibels, and it’s quite pretty to boot. It’s fairly small and light, so no more worries about needing an outlet or carrying around bulky speakers.

Speaking of acoustics, how exactly do they get that great sound at Roy Thomson Hall (the seating layout is quite attractive too), and what are the physics behind what makes venues sound different? And speaking of buildings, what’s with the really bad lecture halls in SF, namely 1101 and 1105? I can’t see in the former unless I’m in the very front row because the incline is so shallow, and there’s always a very... interesting smell in there because there’s virtually no ventilation; the latter only has those foldable tables every two seats (did they think only half of us needed writing surfaces?) and that room is notorious for making everyone really, really sleepy—is it the colour? lighting? temperature? an interesting coincidence of similar profs/lecturers? And the textbooks we use—what makes a great one so useful? The one we used in BME105 was really wordy and you couldn’t really find the information you wanted—there is some doubt as to whether it was there in the first place—whereas it is almost universally acknowledged that Stewart is one of the best calculus textbooks ever, but that can’t be all—both had diagrams, both had tables of contents and indexes, etc. Oh, and don’t get me started about EngSci schedules—

I should stop, there’s a lot more to write and only so much time. One of these days, I’ll have the time to go look all of this stuff up, learn all these extra things and finally appease my curiosity.

(...)

(Maybe.)

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(One can hope...?)