Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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I am a vagina owner from birth, I never imagined the toilet bowl shape would pose an issue to penis owners. From reading your comment I'm still unsure of which toilet bowls you're talking about, I would appreciate if you (or anyone, really) could point to images of both so I, and potentially others, can compare. TIA
Tape a dildo to your vulva now sit down on a round bowl and see if it touches the rim. Now imagine you have to pee while taking a poop and you now have to shove the end down so it pees into the bowl. Do this without touching the rim.
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Overtime, our kitchen knives. Knives need to be thin, as thinner knives cut through ingredients more easily. Today's knives are designed instead to be marketed. Something incredibly thick, and sturdy, to make it feel "premium", when all its doing is tiring you out, since using a heavy knife gets exhausting, especially when its so thick it wedges in ingredients.
Vintage European knives are slim, and almost petite, because they knew how to make a good knife, in the same manner japanese knives are ground extremely thin, sometimes thinner than a postcard.
Thicker helps with balance in the hand. Cheap knives usually are too light in the handle or the blade is so thin it flexes. A sharp knife is what helps cut and you shouldn't work with dull knives.
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My oven’s vents point directly up my face. So when you stand in front of the stovetop while baking something, you’re directly exposed to the fumes of burning gas.
Uhhhh what?
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Water has both adhesive and cohesive properties, and this bullshit is one of the results. I hate it so much. Basically the bit of wwater in contact with the surface of the spout likes to stick to that spot; and the above that likes to stick to the water stuck to the surface and so on, making it kinda roll along angled surfaces even when it seems like gravity should be yanking it right off.
And they absolutely could shape the spout in a way that stops this - they just choose not to.
Never heard of the oil coating trick @DontRedditMyLemmy mentioned, but it makes sense - oil is hydrophobic, so that could eliminate the adhesion part of the equation; and without that moving the stream initially, its cohesion won't be an issue either.
Or do what they do in chemistry which is to take a rod (or in the kitchen anything like a dinner knife or handle) and place it against the spout and let the liquid then run down the rod.
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Towels (or other clothes) can stick to the drum and as you pull them out, the balance of the drum shifts and can cause it to spin. If you are grabbing something in a fuller load, your hand/wrist can become entangled and rotate with the drum.
Step sister ? Are you stuck in the washer ? What ever am I to do!?
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I guess people who are non-binary don't exist according to that. Or intersex people, or people who was born with differently shaped bodies.
The vast majority of people don't fall into that and manufacturers will focus on the majority of customers.
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I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.
UV light breaks the polymer bonds. You now have monomer dust.
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light bulbs that die too often.
those pots and sauce pans that use a screw to connect the handle. the screw head generally places inside the pot and will get to all your food.
chopping boards. plastic chopping boards enhance your meals with microplastic. composite wood enhances your food with bacteria lodged in-between wood pieces. bamboo -- too thin and ends up similar to composite.
Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
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Thankfully, there are some designs that improve on this! Here’s what’s in my kitchen:
The brand is OXO.
I have that and they still are a removed to get in or out of a crowded tool jar. Then I always bump that end switch and they pop open in the jar.
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For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
Wine bottles. After thousands of years of drinking you would think humans would develop a bottle design that doesn't dribble down the side after pouring.
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Tape a dildo to your vulva now sit down on a round bowl and see if it touches the rim. Now imagine you have to pee while taking a poop and you now have to shove the end down so it pees into the bowl. Do this without touching the rim.
It was the shape of the toilet what I couldn't picture, not the usage
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Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
When I replaced a set the other day I learned that some of them are not rated for enclosures
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Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
It's usually the electronic drivers. They overoverheat and degrade. Most burned LED bulbs still have working LEDs and just need to replace some component of the driver board.
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A lot of OTC meds that are in boxes have annoying packaging where you have to peel off the little paper before you can push the pill through the wrapping. The paper doesn't always like to peel off properly and it makes it harder to get the pill out of the packaging.
I always thought this was super on purpose. Is it not intentional design for “child protection?”
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Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
It's usually because of cheap electrolytic capacitors. Letting a $10+ item die because they were too cheap to pay $0.25 instead of $0.15 for a properly rated component.
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No one asked for the spork
I dont think I've ever seen a spork with teeth that could actually pick up food like a fork, so it's just a bad spoon.
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Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
thanks capitalism
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I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
The two piece toilet does make installation a bit easier since it's less weight. I wonder if there are any sort of workplace safety weight limit considerations that come into play. E.g., maybe the 2 piece can be done with 1 person, but a one piece could need 2.
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Those ridiculous new caps on plastic bottles are awful. They only lead to wastage as it's difficult for most people to reseal them properly and anything carbonated gets wasted. Tagging the lid to the bottle is not a world-saving solution for recycling.
Not to be annoying but I actually carry a nice steel thermos with me and pour anything I might drink into the thermos.
It only feels like a hassle the first time. You get a steel thermos with a steel straw and now you're really cooking with gas.
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No one asked for the spork
I love sporks. If you find the right model they are the ultimate eating utensil.
