Fake power outlets at airports??

Encountered recently at an airport: I did the old find-a-power-plug dance, sat down next to this one, and only then noticed that it's fake. It's a sticker, a photo-realistic image of a power outlet, made all the more convincing by the scars and damage. Where did this come from? Who did this, and why? I laughed; I may have cried. Then I moved on. Maybe it was to make me feel human in an environment of cold practicality - or maybe some jerk just likes messing with people. Who knows?

Kaiser, you can do better than this!

I know health care is complicated, but really, "amount you owe or have already paid"?? How about adding "or we owe you, or it's a different amount entirely." The customer's cognitive disconnect between services and pricing is already a big cause of complication in the health care market; every little bit counts.

And the award for Most Unnecessary Signage goes to...

This. As Rain Noe perfectly explains on Core77, "the entire point of [the two symbols] is that they don't require an explanation and can be understood by those who cannot read English." The complicated clarifications, filled with text of three different sizes and styles and variable underlining, ruin a simple and effective design. I'll be so lost in puzzling over all this that I might just ignore the steady red hand and wander into the street!
[Core77]

Emergency-alert buttons should be unpressable!

Recently, poor UI design led to a false incoming-missile alert in Hawaii. This is a terrifying accident - and a failure not of the user, but of design. According to reports, the alert was in the same drop-down menu as test alerts used regularly for various internal purposes; the addition of an "Are you sure?" dialog box didn't help, since most people cruise through dozens of those every day. Buttons with serious consequences really should be unpressable - it should take unusual thought or action to press them. These kinds of designs already exist at all levels; examples from severe to mundane include the classic "turn two keys at once" to launch a missile, "break glass" to pull a fire alarm, the recessed "panic" button on your car keys, even the slightly-longer press required to engage caps lock on a Mac. I hear the employee who pressed the button has been reassigned - but the designer of this button is truly at fault.

Hey, pressure-washer warning label...

...if you don't want me to do it, don't make it look so fun!

Bricking Unsecure Devices: Good, Evil, Both?

Millions (or tens, hundreds of millions, or billions?) of IoT devices are shipped with default usernames and passwords, which users seldom change, and which malicious hackers can then use in attacks. A hacker by the name of Janit0r released his own virus for these devices, which simply bricks them before they can be used for larger bad deeds. And so the moral question: is this bricking of devices good, evil, or both? Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes seems to argue for the "good" side, but there are good arguments for each. I'll stay neutral, and make sure to change my default passwords!
[via Ars Technica]

Theft Deterrence by Disguise, AirPod Edition

Apple's new AirPods are pricey little things, so theft deterrence isn't a bad idea - especially when it's this clever. A $4.99 sticker from Etsy will transform your tech into mint-flavored floss, at least as far as thieves are concerned. This follows some other theft-deterrence-by-disguise examples I've posted for cameras, bikes, and even sandwiches - though my favorite method might be deterrence by guilt.
[via Gizmodo]

Necessity : Invention :: Laziness : Brilliance

As far as bang for your buck, measured in delight delivered per hour of effort, Dave's poster pretty much can't be beat. As Tom said, "Nice one Dave."
[Tom Wysocki, via Core77]

Smart Keys and Unpressable Buttons

I'll admit it: I love my minivan. As long as it's considered for the function of transportation instead of the excitement of driving, there's nothing it can't do. It doesn't skimp on conveniences either, which include smart keys and power sliding doors. However, there's a literally unpressable button in that mix. The idea of a smart key is that it can be in a pocket or bag, and you never have to touch it. To allow you to lock the car without having to find the key, there are "lock" buttons on the outside door handles. The problem is that you can't use the lock buttons until all the doors are closed - so the convenient-but-slow sliding doors force me to wait by the car so I can press the lock button after they close. A simple change seems feasible, where the car could beep to acknowledge the lock button with the doors open, then double-beep when the doors close and successfully execute the lock command. It'd save a few seconds every time, often many times per day, and that adds up. Making buttons more pressable can make smart keys smarter!

Apple's Patent-Pending Pizza Box

Moving on from horrible food-related design jokes, here's a food-related design win: Apple put their world-class design chops into something that isn't several hundred dollars' worth of electronics! Behold, Apple's pizza box, US Patent application #20120024859. It aspires to be the platonic ideal of pizza boxes: no assembly required, stackable, manufacturable from a variety of materials, efficiently round like a certain corporate campus, ridges to elevate the pizza above its own grease puddle, and holes for ventilation to prevent sogginess. Apple: come for the iPhones, stay for the efficiently-contained personal pizzas! (And because you're locked into their ecosystem.)
[via Engadget & Wired]

A Frorking Joke

That misshapen red lump is McDonalds' Frork, which uses french fries as the tines of a "fork" (quotes, I believe, are necessary). It's a corporate/PR joke, and I want to write a blistering rant on it, but I absolutely can't do better than Kat Bauman's at Core77 - so read that instead. Frork you indeed, McDonald's.

Juicero, the poster child of over-engineering...

By now you may have heard of Juicero, the $400 (originally $700!) home juicing machine whose job can be done, and faster, with your own two hands. It's a story of excess, ego, and rampant over-engineering. Bolt's Ben Einstein did a thorough teardown of this beast, identifying a slew of unnecessary custom parts and expensive manufacturing processes. So, how did it happen? Some possibilities:

• Improperly specified requirements. Does it really take "four tons of force" to squeeze out all the juice? If so, the Bloomberg reporter who did it by hand is quite the hulk.
• Bad engineering. Over-engineering is just as bad as under-engineering, it just results in runaway costs instead of functional failures.
• Hype. With $120M in funding, I'm sure the pressure was on to deliver the greatest juicer of all tiiiiiime! With that kind of cash and even a little ego, more is always better - and the CEO even bragged about all the "custom components" and other over-engineered elements in the machine. Dude, that's not a good thing.

Let's all learn this lesson from Juicero, so that we need not learn it from ourselves.

[via Core77]

Bartender trick of the trade

In the sci-fi film Passengers, Chris Pratt is the perpetual lone customer of an android bartender played by Michael Sheen. Pratt's character astutely observes (paraphrasing): "I'm your only customer, so why are you always polishing a glass?" Sheen's droid responds, "Old bartender trick of the trade. People are uncomfortable if you just stand there." So it turns out that the bartender/customer interaction is a designed product, too - whether in the brains of present-day flesh-and-blood sudslingers or the algorithms of future android drink jockeys - and it's designed to accommodate all of our irrational human idiosyncrasies. Good to know.

The Lyft/Uber Option We Really Want

Make it happen. I know a lot of people (myself included) who'd pay the premium.

Swanky Floating Ladle

It might look unstable floating there in that soup, but apparently the Swanky floating ladle from OTOTO will indeed stay upright. Not sure about the one sitting on the counter, though (what black magic is at work there?). Anyway, a ladle that doesn't sink and doesn't melt from leaning against a hot pot edge sounds like a decent improvement - and the swan neck is fairly elegant. Overall, a design that brings a smile to one's face, and that's value in itself!
[via Gizmodo]

Artificial Intelligence: Not quite there yet.

I've generally been impressed with the abilities of virtual assistants in recent years - Siri, Alexa, Cortana, "Okay Google" - to come up with the right answer to real, factual questions asked verbally in natural language by flesh-and-blood humans. However, it turns out we shouldn't trust those answers quite yet. Tom Scocca writes an account of his misadventures regarding an article he wrote, correcting a widespread falsehood about the time required to caramelize onions. He found that Google was extracting a quote his article specifically identified as false, using that as the "correct" answer, and crediting Tom for it. A convoluted path, and it'd require impressive artificial intelligence to parse the correct context - but that's what's needed if an AI assistant is to be truly trusted. It's since been corrected - possibly manually? - and the right answer is shown in the image above. But be warned: AI just isn't quite there yet.
[Gizmodo]

Knife + Fork = Knork

Sure, everyone loves a plastic spork when you need one, but what about the knork? I've frequently used a fork edge to cut through food, with varying success; imagine if the utensil had been designed with that in mind? As Dave Cortright explains on Cool Tools, the knork has an outside edge sharp enough for food but not so sharp as to cut your cheek, and a handle shaped for the application of lateral force. However, would it work as a disposable plastic utensil, reducing waste as the spork does? If not, it may be destined to languish as a sideshow, no matter how many stars it garners on Amazon...
[Cool Tools]

ACLU Dash Button

Amazon Dash buttons are kinda stupid. Trump is really stupid. But hey, can one stupid thing cancel out another? Thanks to intrepid hacker Nathan Pryor, they can! He customized a Dash button so that each press donates $5 to the ACLU. Pressing a button is a satisfying alternative to throwing something across the room or screaming into a pillow - and with this button, it might actually do some good!
[via Engadget & TechCrunch]

Kwik Sip: A drinking fountain in every faucet!

I kind of wish I that I lived in an alternate universe where the Kwik Sip faucet attachment was the ubiquitous norm instead of a weird, geeky outlier. Every faucet magically turns into a drinking fountain anytime you want it? Count me in.
[via Cool Tools]

Curtain Rod Design for Better Darkness

If you really need a dark room - I'm not saying because of a hangover, but I'm thinking it - the cracks of sunlight that creep through the sides of your curtains can be painful. Umbra's Twilight curtain rod addresses that with a simple design tweak: the rod continues around the corner to go flush to the wall, allowing the curtain to do the same. Simple, clever, and effective; rest easy!
[via Lifehacker]