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Comments (59)

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  ancillary
  I found this bit interesting:> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).
• adrian_b
  Such badly designed products are easy to spot by visual inspection.Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
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  AriedK
  This gets quite close to chindogu, the Japanese art of designing objects that kind of serve a very niche purpose, but then without being useful. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/
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  ChrisMarshallNY
  I’ve always enjoyed the “useless teapot” that Don Norman has on the cover of DOET: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61KtiLw7BtL...
• nayroclade
  I’m pretty sure I’ve used cutlery pretty close to this in some hipster restaurants.
• sehugg
  You can see some of these objects at Musée des Arts et Métiers: https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/les-objets-inconfortab...
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  bcherry
  this really reminds me of the "worst volume control" from reddit https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...
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  userbinator
  IC: With AI getting bigger and more controversial and so on, have you used AI to create any of these designs?That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.
• Noe2097
  "what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one? she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. That was my ‘eureka’ moment."Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu
• jeisc
  for the record, I am a furniture designer class 1985 Primrose Center and I made a table without a top to demonstrate this point: https://www.jeisch.com/img/furniture/tab_no_top_1988.jpg and another one which is a table which is a holder for a painting: https://www.jeisch.com/img/furniture/tab_pointy_1987.jpg the painting which is being held in the pointy table is this: https://www.jeisch.com/img/paintings/oil_martyr_1988.jpg but it slides in and out basically it is a horizontal holder a painting.
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  Gigachad
  I love that these are all fairly beautiful, stuff you'd really love to have if it wasn't fundamentally unusable.
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  Incipient
  I feel like I've seen some of these designs a VERY long time ago? Is this something old that the person was just interviewed on recently?
• el_pollo_diablo
  This reminds me of Jacques Carelman's Catalogue d'objets introuvables. Highly recommended. It has already been mentioned on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9789216
• lelanthran
  This is a link to the interview. here is a link to the products website: https://www.theuncomfortable.com/#
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  whiteboardr
  It's missing the Magic Mouse.
• anonymous344
  as a designer and innovator, i appriciete this. this gives me ideas really out of box, just to see these. amazing!i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true
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  jrmg
  Now I’m wondering how you could create ‘uncomfortable’ versions of simple command line tools (ls, cat, more etc.) or perhaps shells.Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)
• indersonlms51
  saved for later. exactly the kind of deep dive i was looking for
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  eszed
  What's wrong about the glasses? I've been staring at them and trying to figure out why they're unworkable, as opposed to just a quirky pair of specs.
• anon
  undefined
• camillomiller
  The glasses would be great for pool playing, as they would sit higher on your line of sight :)
• TimByte
  This is such a great reminder that "good design" is mostly invisible until it breaks
• imp0cat
  The funny thing is that the toothbrush would actually come in handy for cleaning stuff other than teeth.For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.
• qy-mj
  What kinds of terrible product designs have you seen?
• keithnz
  given the title, so may software developers must be living in bliss! /s
• rajesh_me291091
  [dead]
• abstractspoon
  All seems very contrived. Not what I would call creative