The pleasures of poor product design

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...

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.

"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

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/

this really reminds me of the "worst volume control" from reddit https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...

I love that these are all fairly beautiful, stuff you'd really love to have if it wasn't fundamentally unusable.

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?

This is a link to the interview. here is a link to the products website: https://www.theuncomfortable.com/#

It's missing the Magic Mouse.

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

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 ;-)

The glasses would be great for pool playing, as they would sit higher on your line of sight :)

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.

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.

[dead]

given the title, so may software developers must be living in bliss! /s

All seems very contrived. Not what I would call creative