Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
The Sony Mini-stereo on my desk has excellent sound, which is the main thing I suppose; but it has some annoying misfeatures. Take this one: what do you think happens when you hit the “Open CD Tray” button? If you said “The CD tray opens”, think again. Eventually it does, but first, the display switches … Read more
Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical – why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! – but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes. Here is … Read more
As a conscientious techie I do what many car owners don’t: I check the oil and other fluids in our cars once a month, rain or shine. But our latest car, the 2007 Renault Clio, seems determined to foil this good intention. It used to be simple: A fluid would either have a straight dipstick … Read more
“O knob, thou whose perfect roundness doth . . .” Nah. A poet I’m not. Still, I would if I could, because the round knob is a fast disappearing species, a trend well worthy of lament. Throughout the 20th century the round control knob was a mainstay of human interface design for electronic devices. With … Read more
Many times, a small change in a design makes a product a lot better. You know the modern version of the office water cooler: a vertical unit that dispenses cold (and in many models, also hot) water into disposable cups. Well, I’ve just seen one that made my day. The unit in the photo, a … Read more
Our kitchen light fixture started to char its plastic housing, so we went and bought a new China-made one, equipped with two concentric fluorescent lamps like its predecessor. It was only later, after much climbing ladders and drilling holes overhead, that the problem appeared: try as we might, fitting the two lamps seemed impossible to … Read more
Recently I discussed how workers at customer call centers can turn into computer-like zombies. The other day I stood face to face with such a person. I was trying to order two coffees at a fast coffee shop. My wife likes her espresso with a drop of foamed milk on top – “Espresso Macchiato”, meaning … Read more
Until now, we had paper money, and we had plastic – which meant credit cards. Well, now the distinction is blurred: as of April, Israel joined a growing list of countries that have plastic paper money! See the two 20 Shekel banknotes above. The one on the right is the trusty ol’ paper banknote, showing … Read more
I’m getting to like the Lenovo blogs more and more. Consider this sentence, from an early version of an About page they had: Finally, if you need to speak to someone, live, give David Churbuck, Lenovo’s Global VP of Marketing a call, his cell phone is 508 360 6147. This was regrettably removed later from … Read more
My friend Jeff pointed out to me a novel implementation of a coffee-to-go carrying device, in use in a coffeeshop chain in Germany. The assembled device in use is actually less elegant than the usual little tray-with-handle cardboard carriers we’ve had for a long time; in fact you can’t even plop this one down on … Read more