Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
Cross-posting this from my work site… a look at the original Blackberry from 1998, a winning design with different functionality, different constraints and a quite different usage model from today’s designs. Read all about it here!
Edible fruit have been on this planet since the Cretaceous, but they know how to move ahead with the times. See the photo: this pear, recently arrived from our greengrocer, has a barcode on it! Why does a pear need its own barcode? I could understand putting one on the crate, for easier shipping control … Read more
I was in a building where someone decided to give the signage a modern look, and I saw this sign outside a restroom. The people have this angular look, with slanted heads – why not? Anything for effect… But it does occur to me that the guy on the wheelchair with the nonagonal wheel (yep… … Read more
Check the new article on my History of Computing exhibit: a century old teaching aid from Germany, with the added twist that it anticipates today’s well known slogan: “To each pupil his own counting machine!”
We all know about vestigial organs in living creatures, such as the useless vermiform appendix that gives many people a bad time. These were useful in earlier releases of our body plan, but are now just along for the ride. So here is a sighting of a similarly useless historical remnant in a Bosch power … Read more
I was shopping at Office Depot, and next to the checkout line they had this bin full of cheap items on sale. And in it, thrown carelessly with less decorum than potatoes get at the grocer’s, were blister-packaged Flash memory cards. They had 2.0 GB units selling for a pittance. That’s two billion bytes, or … Read more
I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title… Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly … Read more
I was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo. Of course there are Lego kits today for anything from Rocket ships to Medieval castles, but Zaphod … Read more
I was visiting a print design firm and noticed a pile of freshly printed business cards that had the shape of a rectangle with one corner cut off diagonally. I was delighted: this must clearly be the card of some IT professional who wanted to play on the shape of the IBM punched card, right? … Read more
You need to speak Hebrew and French to detect the hilarity of this photo: Here’s the thing: the package contains a local make of Petit Peurre cookies, a timeless biscuit design. However, someone decided to brand it as PTIBER GADOL – literally, “Large Petit Beurre“. Except that Petit, of course, means Little… Oh, and incidentally, … Read more