How often do you turn on the wrong burner on the stove? I do it with some frequency; once a week, maybe, or a couple of times a month. Today I left the room and the waffle iron left over from this morning's banana waffles heated up instead of the kettle. No emergency, just a smoky waffle iron when I wandered back into the kitchen looking for my tea. But it always scares me.
I read a book a few years back about those things: the light switch you always flip wrong even though you've done it a million times, the doors that you feel like a doofus because you push even though the word "Pull" is written on it, the VCR you can't program even though you have an advanced degree, the damn burners on the stove. The book demonstrates that it's not your fault; those things are poorly designed and they are actually tricking you into doing the wrong thing. It's reassuring to know that. Stupid burners.
I don't think it is wrong design but the perverse intentionality of inanimate objects. There is a long and obscure analysis of this in Heidigger's Being and Time.
Posted by: wab | January 16, 2005 at 04:19 PM
I love when it's not my fault, because it usually is.
Posted by: Scully | January 16, 2005 at 06:37 PM
I did it with an empty tea kettle once. The kettle and the burner semi-fused. Once I managed to pull it off, the blue glaze was still coated onto the burner, which smoked and smelled ever after and couldn't be scrubbed off.
Posted by: Dylan | January 16, 2005 at 07:41 PM
Even book titles:
For _Psychology of Everyday Things_, the 'P' word was chosen for the cute abbreviation. In the later edition he changed the name to _Design of..._ because the book was consistently misshelved in the Psychology section.
If the experts can't get it right, how do you ever expect us mere mortal engineers to have a hope of coming close.
And I hate the layout of the knobs on my stove and the window controls in the Jeep. No matter that I have had one for two years and the other for nine, I still reach for the wrong control half the time.
Posted by: Butch | January 17, 2005 at 12:54 AM
There is a great website that collects examples of bad designs.
http://www.baddesigns.com
Posted by: Bryan | January 17, 2005 at 12:57 PM