Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
So we had to ship some parcels overseas, and we were given these forms to fill at the post office. Not surprisingly, the form had four copies, and asked for a lot of shipping and customs information. what was surprising, however, was the incredibly poor functional design of the form’s layout. Most obviously silly was … Read more
One can hardly imagine a more fun child’s plaything than a toy balloon. These have been around in various forms since the middle ages at least, and are as pleasing to today’s children as ever. And they generally look like the balloon in the illustration below, from the classic children’s book, beloved by generations of … Read more
One of the most famous sculptures made in Israel is “Nimrod”, created in 1939 by Itzhak Danziger. A powerful figure in red sandstone, it depicts a naked young man with a falcon on his shoulder and a sword held behind his back, looking intensely ahead. This is Nimrod, the biblical great-grandson of Noah, king of … Read more
Unusual business cards are not rare; many companies and individuals try to deviate from the traditional white rectangle design in the hope of standing out from the crowd. But today I was handed a card that goes far beyond this. Here it is: This card has a rotating wheel that allows different short phrases to … Read more
One seldom gives much thought to the humble sugar packet seen in coffee shops (unless one is a sucrologist, at any rate) but there’s an interesting observation related to its design. A few years ago the age-old form factor of these packets – a rectangle some 7 by 5 cm in size – was supplemented … Read more
Some designs never change… Consider this one: Two instances of the same product exactly – but separated in time by two millennia. The die on the left is one of a collection of bone dice I saw in the archeological museum of Pompeii. The design worked then, and it works now. Nothing to improve… … Read more
A century ago Gilbert Small, of Waltham, Massachusetts, invented a compact pocket calculator that is small, effective, and designed with special attention to usability. Read the new article on my History of Computing site to see what he’d crafted!
We’re all familiar with the spring-loaded paper napkin dispenser to the right. Every low-priced restaurant and diner has these; you’d think it has hit a sweet spot of stable cost and performance. After all, it works, doesn’t it? And yet, recently I’ve run into a major improvement on the theme: a competing design that has … Read more
See this product which I found at a hardware superstore. Looks useful enough for organizing stray cables in the home. But it has another unexpected function. As you see in the close up, this device has an added benefit beyond storing extra cord length, and the packaging clearly states it: Helps prevent children. You don’t … Read more
Something caught my attention in this children’s playground in our neighborhood, where my kids used to play long years ago. Back then the slide was made of metal, but the new one works just fine. However, back then the slide ended in a large sandbox, which was a major attraction in its own right. Kids … Read more