Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
Amazingly, it only took 2 years from the first large electronic computer, the one-of-a-kind ENIAC, to the appearance of modular, easy-to-maintain hardware that would lend itself to easy mass production. This was the IBM 604 with its now forgotten Pluggable Units. Check Piercing the unknown, a new historical exhibit at the Possibly Interesting web site!
Sometimes one runs into elegant design in humble places… I was sitting in a meeting and fiddling idly with the remote control of the NEC LCD projector. After toying with the laser for a while, I pushed out the battery cover on the back. As expected, it unlatched and slid open, like these things always … Read more
Sometimes you find elegant design in the places you least expect it. We stayed in the Dan Carmel in Haifa, and the small supplies in the bathroom came in color-coordinated little boxes: shower cap, cotton pads, the usual stuff. Still, they failed to go all the way: they had tall bottles for the shampoo and … Read more
And now, following Parts 1 and 2, here is the last installment… These days, more and more Notebooks come with displays branded by the makers as VibrantView, or CrystaslBrite, or OptiClear… exciting names indeed. What they all refers to is glossy LCD screens, which would be much better described as GlareMirror, or UglyReflector, or maybe … Read more
They say that form follows function. So – take a look at the form of this strange device, which stands about a meter tall. Can you guess its function? No, it isn’t a trashcan with dreadlocks. I saw this thing in the Biosphere at Potsdam. This pleasant museum is smaller and less ambitious (should I … Read more
We discussed the recent trend that is eliminating the optimal resolution in notebook computer screens. Another undesirable trend is the move to widescreen displays. These days it is almost impossible to buy a notebook PC with the traditional 4:3 screen form factor; all new models boast a “wide” screen with a 16:10 form factor such … Read more
Something very odd is happening to the LCD screens on the Notebook computers that play such a major role in our existence. The first aptly named “laptops” had small, low-contrast monochrome screens that had “eye strain” written all over them (well, not all of them did – the Grid Compass, in 1982, had a lovely … Read more
These days, every product and service come with scary warnings intended to cover the maker’s back side in case you harm yourself. Electrical appliances warn you not to drop them in water (Duh!), restaurant menus tell you you can die by eating their food (not here, thank God, but in the US they do), coffee … Read more
We already saw how overuse of pictorial instructions can be confusing. Well, I just ran into a wonderful victory of this trend. I passed a large office copier – the Konica 7222 – and here is what I saw on its document feeder: These guys spared no effort in their belt-and-suspenders approach: there is large … Read more
Here is an absolutely trivial product feature that turns out to be very nice. This is the latch release for the more recent IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad notebook computers. I’ve been through more models of Thinkpad than I remember, and until the T4x series they all had two latch releases on the front edge of … Read more