First pitiful design example: Door-mounted video rack

What follows is the experience that originally inspired the creation of the Good, Bad, and Ugly Design forum. The story is absolutely factual.

Picture if you will the following homeowner quandary: Lots of old videocassettes and no convenient place to put them. My wife suggests that surely someone has a rack that could hang on a closet door. Quick Google search. Bingo. Yes of course, you can buy them online. So we went shopping, followed by a naïve purchase, based on the assumption that something sold to hold videos while hanging on the back of a closet door would tend to function in such a way.

Wrong in this case.

The device is simple enough, as you can imagine. Installation consisted of taking it out of the box and hanging it on the closet door. First problematic observation was that the sides of each rack were open so that the video on both ends of each shelf was about half on the shelf and half hanging into space. Each time the door opened and closed, there was a non-zero chance that one or more videos would slip out the side of one shelf or the other and plummet to the carpet. Trouble enough, but amazingly enough, not the big problem.

video_door_rack.jpg

My wife installed the thing on the door (as I said, by hanging it there) and began to put videos onto it. Her bad. The rack had multiple shelves, and probably held maybe 100 videos (approximately the size of our pile). By the time my wife was filling the last shelf row with videocassettes, the most fundamental design flaw was revealed.

The brackets holding this thing on the top of the door were made of soft metal, sort of a soft aluminum (harder than a pop can, but weaker than a tin can, albeit thicker). What were the designers thinking? Obviously they weren’t thinking that if someone hangs this thing on a door and puts a video in each spot designed to hold one, that before the entire shelf was full, the weight of the videos would cause the brackets to simply flex and bend, and that the entire contraption, including maybe 30 pounds of video cassettes would come crashing to the floor in a heap. I could understand it if we had taken something entirely out of its designed function (such as our ill-fated adventure at housing a hamster in a bird cage) and tried to put videocassettes into it. But this device was designed to hold precisely as many videos as she placed onto it, but was not simultaneously designed to actually remain on a closet door afterward.

Tuition cost: $39.99 for the rack, $7.95 for shipping, $39.99 refunded, another $7.00 to ship it back, lost time to clean up videos, vent our spleens, repackage and ship back.
Net loss: $14.95 for a product that was never designed to work in the first place.

Epilogue: The company that sold us the “Over-the-Door Rack – Video” apparently no longer sells such a device, functional or not. The device in question can be purchased, but you won’t find it mentioned as a “video rack.” Poor design? Overzealous marketing? We may never know.

A little more on design

Design is spiritual or conceptual creation prior to physical instantiation. A creator/engineer/designer thinks through things up front, then applies tools and methods in an attempt to conceptualize a particular thing (object, product, system, process) to achieve some purpose (whatever it might be). I suppose the measure of success for a designer lies in the degree to which that design meets the set of desirable objectives, and fails conversely.

Why does it seem so tough sometimes? I’m continually stunned at what I’ve come to refer to as “products that were obviously not designed to do the thing they were designed for,” or alternatively, “products that were never designed to work a single time.” Seems like I’ve been coming across these in spades the past few years—stuff that fails right out of the box.

In fairness, failures are easier to write about, in part because they’re generally more obvious. That’s probably because spectacular failures generally create significant inconvenience that tends to get our attention. Spectacular successes sometimes fly under the radar because it’s just the way it’s supposed to work. In addition, things that have been around for a while that really are spectacular (and amazing that they can even function at all) are often simply a backdrop. For example, I have some significant nits associated with air travel, but of course that’s against a backdrop of air travel, which is itself a pretty amazing and spectacularly successful thing.

So I guess I need to qualify things a bit. For my purposes, successes to be included here are those that are truly spectacular, whether large or small, and which represent some advance in art, science or practice. Often they represent an almost amazingly obvious but small improvement. For example, for a period of about 10 years, my wife and I hauled around a constant stream of newborn infants in carriers that forced you to cock your arm at an unnatural angle. That’s because the handle was always perpendicular to the baby and hence perpendicular to the direction a father faces while carrying a baby carrier. So who was the genius who realized that you could put two 90 degree jogs in the handle, creating a relatively small stretch of handle parallel to the baby and thus permit you to haul your infant with your arm in a natural position?! I don’t know, but whoever it is should be knighted. Pure genius. Amazingly, while I hauled kids around like that for 10 years, it never dawned on me to think about that change in design. That’s the thing about brilliant design. It often looks like a very small step that is huge, but apparently non-obvious until done, and then entirely obvious afterward. Those are the successes.

The failures tend to jump out obviously enough and it’s somewhat natural to dwell on the negative. But I’m not looking at garden variety failures, like when things wear out before they ought to, or something went wrong in manufacturing. I’m looking at egregious failures in which the whole thing was really never designed to work in the first place—products essentially doomed long before they were ever manufactured.

I’m also curious about common threads, and I’m confident that some will emerge, but I believe that they all share the common attribute that the designers did not consider fundamental and essential scenarios of usage. We’ll have to see as the observational pool grows over time.

The “Good, Bad and Ugly Design” Forum

Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” (The Strenuous Life)

I guess the bulk of our lives is spent in a sort of gray twilight in which the same things happen in approximately the same way, over and over again. But then there are those notable moments when we encounter something truly memorable. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s just downright ugly. But these are the highlights of our lives, for better or worse.

The purpose of this forum is to capture those stunning design moments that bless us, curse us, or just amuse the heck out of us on a daily basis.