HapiFork nudges you to slow your eating...

Fitting squarely in that tricky category of "products designed to save us from ourselves," the HapiFork is a chubby little utensil that aims to make you, well, less chubby.  It's generally known that eating too quickly contributes to overeating, so the HapiFork detects the rate of your fork servings and vibrates if you're eating to fast.  In theory, a fine mechanism for self-control - but in practice, there could be problems. Meals are social occasions, and using a product with such a stigma (and no good looks to save it) may be a nonstarter. Still, similar user-guidance has worked for Sonicare toothbrushes which time your brushing and beep to cue a move to the next quadrant of your mouth - so maybe there's hope yet!

[via Gizmodo]

Starbucks Reusable Cup: A Helpful Hybrid

Starbucks recently announced a $1 reusable cup option for your caffeine fix, in an attempt to reduce the cardboard cup waste resulting from over 98% of their drink sales. They know it's a tough proposition to BYOC - something fragile, expensive, even sentimental - but hope that an impulse buy might be persuasive, especially since it pays for itself over 10 drinks with 10-cent discounts. It's a hybrid between permanent and disposable, where you can reuse it but wouldn't really care if you lost it - the same tack Gladware took to compete with Tupperware. It doesn't last as long, it doesn't cost as much - but it shifts the balance from disposable to reusable, if not all the way to permanent and durable. That shift could help, if people buy into it - and here's hoping they will.
[via Gizmodo, photo from The Parkhurst Group]

TrailerTail, for shapely aerodynamic truck butts...

The trucking industry is designed for efficiency: modular shipping containers, standardized everything, and even sleeper cabs help maintain razor-thin margins. However, the versatility-emphasized rectangular shape of the containers isn't designed for aerodynamic efficiency - and the boxy butt of a truck leaves a lot of gas-guzzling turbulence in its wake. But even if you can't change the standard, you may be able to adapt to it - which ATDynamics has done with its TrailerTail add-on. The flaps unfold from the back to streamline air flow and save fuel, reportedly paying for themselves in under a year. When every little bit counts, a clever design like this can make a big difference.
[via Core77]

Bevel Cup, a clean-storing coffee mug...

Sometimes you don't notice a problem until a design comes along to fix it - and darned if coffee mugs don't fit the bill.  Normal  mugs can be stored sitting right side up, in which case dust and debris can fall in; or they can be stored upside down, which prevents proper drying if they're wet and gets the rim dirty regardless.  The Bevel Cup from designers Gao Fenglin & Zhou Buyi finds a third way, with the cup resting on the flat 40-degree angle of its handle.  Moisture drains, dust falls off, and the rim is held off the resting surface.  Ergonomics may not be the best here, but if you tend toward germophobia this may be the mug for you!

[via Gizmodo]

iPhone Buttons Now More Pressable!

Back in 2011 I wrote about some unpressable buttons on the iPhone: the media-player buttons that appear when double-clicking the home button from a locked screen were too close together, causing accidental track skips instead of the intended pauses. You can see that problem in the left screenshot; I mocked up a quick fix shown in the center; now Apple has fixed it in iOS 6.1 as shown on the right! Yes, I know that correlation doesn't imply causation - but I'd like to think I was one voice among many who pointed out this problem. Good job, Apple, for making your buttons much more pressable!

Soccer Ball for the Third World

How do you take a mature and standardized first-world product - a soccer ball - and adapt it for the third world?  The One World Futbol Project found that it takes a little rethinking: instead of a standard inflated ball that would quickly pop on a rocky makeshift soccer field, they designed a "virtually indestructible" solid foam ball that never needs a pump. The effort has all the other hallmarks of a good-for-everyone design: sustainability (the ball far outlasts normal ones, reducing waste), a buy-one-give-one program for first-world patrons, no child labor; heck, even Sting was involved. It's good to see that not all the design effort is being put into the newest state-of-the-art World Cup championship ball - good design can make more of a difference here than there.
[via Core77]

Parental Product Design #1: Diaper Genie

It's been a while since the last new post here on Unpressable Buttons, but there's a good reason: I'm a new father! That also means a lot more coverage of parenting products, so let's start with a doozie: the Diaper Genie. This strikes me as a design that's fairly mature, seeming to have been refined over many iterations in a few short years. It's ended up packing some impressive features (and from the drawing above, heavily-patented features) into a pretty low-cost product: the continuous "tube" of bagging to simplify liner-changing; the well-located and obviously-childproof cutter to shear the bagging when removing a load; the two-stage sealing doors that work like an air lock to keep poopy smells in; and of course, the foot pedal, because you don't have any extra hands when changing a diaper. It's satisfyingly efficient, functional, no-nonsense - and unlike many baby products, non-cutesy. That's fine, though - the baby herself is plenty cute for me!