Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
New article on my History of Computing site: Elisha Kally’s water flow calculator, a sophisticated network calculator based on the Hazen-Williams formula. This ingenious slide rule can calculate flows and hydraulic head losses in complicated networks comprising up to six different pipes, all at once. Check it out!
Here is the control panel of a counter-top cold/hot Tami 4 water bar. Push a button – you get hot water. Push another – here’s a refreshing cup of cold water. But… which button?! Of course, that’s why the buttons – all seven of them, for there’s a lot more you can make this glorified … Read more
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 … Read more
I saw the… whatever… below in Hackney, London, and can’t resist sharing it with you. Is this a weird whatever-it-is or what? 🙂
Not all cool ideas are actually good. Back in 1983, around the time the IBM PC made its debut, my boss at Intel had acquired a very innovative personal computer: the Hewlett Packard 150. I remember it well; it was a really cool machine – at least in the context of its day: it had … Read more
While taking in the wonderful Israel Perosnal Computer Museum in Haifa I came face to face with the Intelligent Systems Compucolor II, a bizarre 1977 home computer built into a repurposed 13″ TV set. What drew my attention was the strange keboard layout: the arrow keys were clustered at the top right corner. This is … Read more
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 … Read more
A new article on my History of Computing site traces the evolution of the straight slide rule over its 3 centuries of service. From a design perspective this progress is an interesting one to follow because the same basic principle evolves through a sequence of progressively more effective designs, culminating in the familiar form that … Read more
One of the first scientific facts you learn as a child is that snowflakes, those lovely art creations of nature, have a six-fold symmetry. And they do; the properties of water molecules see to that. Hence the standard symbol for snow (and freezing, and cold in general). One of the much later facts you learn … Read more
Sure thing, Form should follow Function… but some designers haven’t heard of that. Like the Sony designers responsible for the two weird design choices below. Round knobs are round because they need to be gripped and rotated… an optimal design for our opposable-thumb grip. But the radio below has a round knob whose function is … Read more