7 ms·

I love little "niches" like these. So many things in our lives are so filled with "depth" that even extremely observant people will never notice. Sometimes I j

I love little "niches" like these. So many things in our lives are so filled with "depth" that even extremely observant people will never notice. Sometimes I just sit back and wonder at what the designers or manufacturers of common things had to deal with. Perhaps the shape of a mug handle was a point of contention between several people, or the thickness of your desk was the result of a compromise that came from a grueling 4 hour long meeting, or there is an engineer somewhere that is extremely proud of the weeks they spent designing an office chair wheel that won't suck up a cord, or the designer which worked several weekends in a row to completely redesign the shape of the base of a desk lamp so that the regulatory sticker could be placed on the back and not on the front. It makes me feel better when I feel like I'm wasting time trying out different button shapes and sizes for a stupid menu somewhere deep in an app that nobody will ever really care about.

madvoid 10y ago
You should watch some of engineerguy's videos on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/engineerguyvideo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/engineerguyvideo/videos. He goes over some of these small details in products and why they are there. It's quite interesting!
ghaff 10y ago
In a related vein, back when I was a product manager, I was always struck by how many customers came through who were the #1 manufacturer of toilet seats or plastic milk bottles or whatever in the United States.
csours 10y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1741/ https://www.xkcd.com/1741/
- ptrincr 10y ago
  I get this exact same feeling, a thousand fold when I'm in a supermarket. To think of the amount of effort it has taken to design, manufacture, package, market and transport all those products (edible or not) is a little overwhelming.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Prior to eating a meal I occasionally give thanks a la grace style to someone in that chain. Random things like thanking the person who fitted the alternator belt on the tractor that ploughed the soil the carrots were grown in.
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      Have you read "Religion for Atheists", by any chance?
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        I haven't. Sounds like the kind of thing that might appeal to me, will look it up.
    - coldpie 10y ago
      This is why food waste killllls me. A field was sown, carrots grown, weeds picked, carrot harvested, inspected, washed, shipped, stored, sold, aaaand... it rots in my fridge and goes straight into the trash can off to the landfill. Ugh.
      - patrick_haply 10y ago
        Or my favorite: life forms that have spent millions of years decomposing and transforming into oil are drilled out of the ground, refined, hauled somewhere, turned into plastic, hauled somewhere else to be formed into a spoon shape, hauled halfway across the globe to reach your table/store/restaurant... just to be thrown out without being used.
  - Markoff 10y ago
    i think more about economic side of the things, how can be profitable for all parties (producer, transport company and supermarket chain is bare minimum) to sell me 2l bottle of soda for 0.19€, it's taking quite a lot space weighing 2kg, producer is about 150km away, yet all three parties make profit on this product? the letter itself (flavored soda) has probably lower value than packaging is packaging, transportation and storing in supermarket taking space of other products. is there product which would take more space and weight more while being extremely cheap as soda drink? i can't think of anything as large and cheap as bottle of soda
- FabHK 10y ago
  Not only relevant, but sure feels like the inspiration for the GP comment.
- epimetheus 10y ago
  I actually find it extremely interesting that xkcd is so spot on and the term "Relevant xkcd" has almost been "Simponised" in that "Relevant xkcd" comes up as much as "Simpsons did that." I wonder how many other cases of popular culture is so highly cited like this.
- josefresco 10y ago
  Having recently "invented" and manufactured a physical product, I can attest to how much time and effort is put into seemingly inconsequential product features. Coming from tech/services like many of you I had no idea how much time I'd spend on minor features that happened to be critical to bringing the product to market. That being said, when coding software or accomplishing a purely "tech" task, most of my time is usually spent on the "minor details" so I guess it isn't all that much different.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Yep, and many times we end up with lousy products despite all this work. Case in point in the xkcd comic: the switch on the lamp cord. What an utterly idiotic idea; it's only done because it's cheaper, not because it's better for the user. In fact, I'd assert that lamps, in general, have some of the very worst product design for any class of modern product. They haven't improved substantially in many decades. We have amazing LED lighting now (as seen on the headlights of new cars, both the DRL systems and also on some cars which use LEDs for the main headlights), but our table/floor lamps are still unchanged from the 1950s, designed around the ancient Edison bulb, with horrible user interfaces (switch on cord where it's hard to reach, or switch next to bulb where you have to stick your arm up inside the lampshade and try to find it in the dark).
booleandilemma 10y ago
I recommend the movie Objectified, which is about exactly this. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified
tormeh 10y ago
On the other hand, a lot of decisions are taken on the spot. Really, an astonishing amount. Of course the higher the volume of the product is, and the harder it is to change, the more effort is put into decisions, and there's seemingly no upper limit to how much effort managers are willing to allocate.
hkmurakami 10y ago
I used to work for Denso (who's heavily quoted in this story) in their research lab. I remember my boss telling me that one of the rubber seals in their HVAC system had something like 17 patents to get the characteristics just right (iirc they're the #1 auto HVAC supplier). (It fit onto one of the openings in the box-like compartment you can see in the left side of the unit http://www.hpaircraft.com/neon/100_2342a.JPG http://www.hpaircraft.com/neon/100_2342a.JPG) I didn't appreciate it then, but I find modern automobiles to be a minor miracle given how many components go into it and the level of detail that goes into designing each one, both individually and so that they all get nicely packaged together.
- mtdewcmu 10y ago
  What I think is interesting is that cars are technically complex, yet there are a lot of car companies, each making cars their own way. Usually, products that are highly technically complex are only made by a small number of companies, since R&D is expensive. I don't really know enough to speculate on why the car industry is that way.
  - gydfi 10y ago
    Interesting question. Partially it's that the global car market is huge so there's enough profit to go around even with a lot of companies. I think the more important reason is historical, though. The car companies of today were almost all established back in the days when shipping cars internationally was expensive, and operating a factory in a foreign country was difficult. So each major industrialised country wound up with a few manufacturers after a lot of consolidation -- in the US dozens of manufacturers got reduced down to three. Then there's three German, two French, one (major) Italian... Japan is a weird case but it is still consolidating... Only in the last few decades has the car market become really global, and as a result there's ongoing consolidation continuing, eg Fiat-Chrysler and Renault-Nissan.
    - baddox 10y ago
      I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if many states didn't heavily subsidize their own car manufacturers early in the automobile boom.
kchoudhu 10y ago
The history of the disposable coffee cup lid is always what I point to when people tell me that engineers and designers don't earn their pay. http://philpatton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/05/the-coffee-lids-story-updated.html http://philpatton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/05/the-coffee-l... Convenience comes at a price, and only after a great deal of thought.
- mseebach 10y ago
  The little air hole is almost always too small to allow smooth drinking. A quick poke with the tip of a ball point pen is perfect. Engineering is hereby PROVED INVALID.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
flippyhead 10y ago
I've heard people say that the space shuttle is so complex no single person can understand it entirely. I feel like my car is likely a candidate now too.
- sib 10y ago
  Or a pencil, for that matter... I, Pencil (from 1958): http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
iamatworknow 10y ago
>Sometimes I just sit back and wonder at what the designers or manufacturers of common things had to deal with. I do the same, and probably the one item that I've thought about more often than others is, hilariously, those novelty testicles they sell to attach to your car's trailer hitch. Between design, materials, manufacture, distribution...just how much work goes into truck nuts?
m-i-l 10y ago
Funnily enough, I was just thinking the exact opposite this morning - how little design thought must go into some things. It was in relation to the poor user experience I'd just had from the toilets at work. As usual, the poorly designed/configured flush splashed water out of the bowl when I flushed, but I've become adept at jumping back in time. The other more pertinent issue is that the cubicle is so small in relation to the door size that I had a struggle to get out without brushing my coat against the wet splashed bowl. On this issue, I was thinking that it was probably caused by someone just buying some standard sized off-the-shelf components that looked roughly right and whacking them together, e.g. 2m board for sides, and 1m door with toilet protruding 80cm from wall, leaving you 20cm between toilet and open door (note that these are example sizes just to make the point - I didn't actually measure anything). In other words, no-one thought how big the cubicle actually needed to be. I guess there's probably some correlation between design input and cost, i.e. its probably just not worth anyone spending too much time thinking about that sort of thing.
- stronglikedan 10y ago
  I often find bathrooms that were around before ADA [0], and have since been retrofitted, have the worst designs. That's why I try to use the handy-capable stalls, or "suites" as I call them, whenever I have a chance. Most newer bathroom designs seem sane to me, since they were designed with ADA compliance in mind. Except for airport bathrooms for some reason, where you have to cram yourself and your luggage into a stall that's the same size as any other stall outside of the airport. [0]https://www.ada.gov/ https://www.ada.gov/
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    I agree that the older, retrofitted bathrooms are indeed horrible designs. However, I completely disagree that newer bathroom designs are "sane". I have seen very, very few "sane" public bathrooms; usually they're just in fancy restaurants where they don't use the standard metal partitions, and instead spend a lot of money on real walls and tile and wooden doors. As far as I'm concerned, any public bathroom where the partitions between stalls have any gap at all (especially about 12 inches as they usually are) are not sane. There is no reason for that gap; it's just creepy.

madvoid 10y ago

You should watch some of engineerguy's videos on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/engineerguyvideo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/engineerguyvideo/videos. He goes over some of these small details in products and why they are there. It's quite interesting!

ghaff 10y ago

In a related vein, back when I was a product manager, I was always struck by how many customers came through who were the #1 manufacturer of toilet seats or plastic milk bottles or whatever in the United States.

csours 10y ago

Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1741/ https://www.xkcd.com/1741/

ptrincr 10y ago
I get this exact same feeling, a thousand fold when I'm in a supermarket. To think of the amount of effort it has taken to design, manufacture, package, market and transport all those products (edible or not) is a little overwhelming.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Prior to eating a meal I occasionally give thanks a la grace style to someone in that chain. Random things like thanking the person who fitted the alternator belt on the tractor that ploughed the soil the carrots were grown in.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Have you read "Religion for Atheists", by any chance?
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      I haven't. Sounds like the kind of thing that might appeal to me, will look it up.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    This is why food waste killllls me. A field was sown, carrots grown, weeds picked, carrot harvested, inspected, washed, shipped, stored, sold, aaaand... it rots in my fridge and goes straight into the trash can off to the landfill. Ugh.
    - patrick_haply 10y ago
      Or my favorite: life forms that have spent millions of years decomposing and transforming into oil are drilled out of the ground, refined, hauled somewhere, turned into plastic, hauled somewhere else to be formed into a spoon shape, hauled halfway across the globe to reach your table/store/restaurant... just to be thrown out without being used.
- Markoff 10y ago
  i think more about economic side of the things, how can be profitable for all parties (producer, transport company and supermarket chain is bare minimum) to sell me 2l bottle of soda for 0.19€, it's taking quite a lot space weighing 2kg, producer is about 150km away, yet all three parties make profit on this product? the letter itself (flavored soda) has probably lower value than packaging is packaging, transportation and storing in supermarket taking space of other products. is there product which would take more space and weight more while being extremely cheap as soda drink? i can't think of anything as large and cheap as bottle of soda
FabHK 10y ago
Not only relevant, but sure feels like the inspiration for the GP comment.
epimetheus 10y ago
I actually find it extremely interesting that xkcd is so spot on and the term "Relevant xkcd" has almost been "Simponised" in that "Relevant xkcd" comes up as much as "Simpsons did that." I wonder how many other cases of popular culture is so highly cited like this.
josefresco 10y ago
Having recently "invented" and manufactured a physical product, I can attest to how much time and effort is put into seemingly inconsequential product features. Coming from tech/services like many of you I had no idea how much time I'd spend on minor features that happened to be critical to bringing the product to market. That being said, when coding software or accomplishing a purely "tech" task, most of my time is usually spent on the "minor details" so I guess it isn't all that much different.
Arizhel 10y ago
Yep, and many times we end up with lousy products despite all this work. Case in point in the xkcd comic: the switch on the lamp cord. What an utterly idiotic idea; it's only done because it's cheaper, not because it's better for the user. In fact, I'd assert that lamps, in general, have some of the very worst product design for any class of modern product. They haven't improved substantially in many decades. We have amazing LED lighting now (as seen on the headlights of new cars, both the DRL systems and also on some cars which use LEDs for the main headlights), but our table/floor lamps are still unchanged from the 1950s, designed around the ancient Edison bulb, with horrible user interfaces (switch on cord where it's hard to reach, or switch next to bulb where you have to stick your arm up inside the lampshade and try to find it in the dark).

booleandilemma 10y ago

I recommend the movie Objectified, which is about exactly this. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified

tormeh 10y ago

On the other hand, a lot of decisions are taken on the spot. Really, an astonishing amount. Of course the higher the volume of the product is, and the harder it is to change, the more effort is put into decisions, and there's seemingly no upper limit to how much effort managers are willing to allocate.

hkmurakami 10y ago

I used to work for Denso (who's heavily quoted in this story) in their research lab. I remember my boss telling me that one of the rubber seals in their HVAC system had something like 17 patents to get the characteristics just right (iirc they're the #1 auto HVAC supplier). (It fit onto one of the openings in the box-like compartment you can see in the left side of the unit http://www.hpaircraft.com/neon/100_2342a.JPG http://www.hpaircraft.com/neon/100_2342a.JPG) I didn't appreciate it then, but I find modern automobiles to be a minor miracle given how many components go into it and the level of detail that goes into designing each one, both individually and so that they all get nicely packaged together.

mtdewcmu 10y ago
What I think is interesting is that cars are technically complex, yet there are a lot of car companies, each making cars their own way. Usually, products that are highly technically complex are only made by a small number of companies, since R&D is expensive. I don't really know enough to speculate on why the car industry is that way.
- gydfi 10y ago
  Interesting question. Partially it's that the global car market is huge so there's enough profit to go around even with a lot of companies. I think the more important reason is historical, though. The car companies of today were almost all established back in the days when shipping cars internationally was expensive, and operating a factory in a foreign country was difficult. So each major industrialised country wound up with a few manufacturers after a lot of consolidation -- in the US dozens of manufacturers got reduced down to three. Then there's three German, two French, one (major) Italian... Japan is a weird case but it is still consolidating... Only in the last few decades has the car market become really global, and as a result there's ongoing consolidation continuing, eg Fiat-Chrysler and Renault-Nissan.
  - baddox 10y ago
    I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if many states didn't heavily subsidize their own car manufacturers early in the automobile boom.

kchoudhu 10y ago

The history of the disposable coffee cup lid is always what I point to when people tell me that engineers and designers don't earn their pay. http://philpatton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/05/the-coffee-lids-story-updated.html http://philpatton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/05/the-coffee-l... Convenience comes at a price, and only after a great deal of thought.

mseebach 10y ago
The little air hole is almost always too small to allow smooth drinking. A quick poke with the tip of a ball point pen is perfect. Engineering is hereby PROVED INVALID.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

flippyhead 10y ago

I've heard people say that the space shuttle is so complex no single person can understand it entirely. I feel like my car is likely a candidate now too.

sib 10y ago
Or a pencil, for that matter... I, Pencil (from 1958): http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

iamatworknow 10y ago

>Sometimes I just sit back and wonder at what the designers or manufacturers of common things had to deal with. I do the same, and probably the one item that I've thought about more often than others is, hilariously, those novelty testicles they sell to attach to your car's trailer hitch. Between design, materials, manufacture, distribution...just how much work goes into truck nuts?

m-i-l 10y ago

Funnily enough, I was just thinking the exact opposite this morning - how little design thought must go into some things. It was in relation to the poor user experience I'd just had from the toilets at work. As usual, the poorly designed/configured flush splashed water out of the bowl when I flushed, but I've become adept at jumping back in time. The other more pertinent issue is that the cubicle is so small in relation to the door size that I had a struggle to get out without brushing my coat against the wet splashed bowl. On this issue, I was thinking that it was probably caused by someone just buying some standard sized off-the-shelf components that looked roughly right and whacking them together, e.g. 2m board for sides, and 1m door with toilet protruding 80cm from wall, leaving you 20cm between toilet and open door (note that these are example sizes just to make the point - I didn't actually measure anything). In other words, no-one thought how big the cubicle actually needed to be. I guess there's probably some correlation between design input and cost, i.e. its probably just not worth anyone spending too much time thinking about that sort of thing.

stronglikedan 10y ago
I often find bathrooms that were around before ADA [0], and have since been retrofitted, have the worst designs. That's why I try to use the handy-capable stalls, or "suites" as I call them, whenever I have a chance. Most newer bathroom designs seem sane to me, since they were designed with ADA compliance in mind. Except for airport bathrooms for some reason, where you have to cram yourself and your luggage into a stall that's the same size as any other stall outside of the airport. [0]https://www.ada.gov/ https://www.ada.gov/
- Arizhel 10y ago
  I agree that the older, retrofitted bathrooms are indeed horrible designs. However, I completely disagree that newer bathroom designs are "sane". I have seen very, very few "sane" public bathrooms; usually they're just in fancy restaurants where they don't use the standard metal partitions, and instead spend a lot of money on real walls and tile and wooden doors. As far as I'm concerned, any public bathroom where the partitions between stalls have any gap at all (especially about 12 inches as they usually are) are not sane. There is no reason for that gap; it's just creepy.