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Worst Design Ever? Plastic Clamshell Packaging
Hugh Pickens writes "Rebecca Rosen writes that if you've recently opened up — or, more specifically, tried to open up — a CFL light bulb, you can sympathize with the question posted on Quora last year, 'What is the worst piece of design ever done?' The site's users have given resounding support to one answer: plastic clamshell packaging. 'Design should help solve problems' — clamshells are supposed to make it harder to steal small products and easier for employees to arrange on display — but this packaging, says Anita Schillhorn, makes new ones, such as time wasted, frustration, and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out. The problem is so pervasive there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to 'wrap rage,' 'the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-remove packaging.' Amazon and Wal-Mart are prodding more manufacturers to change their packaging to cut waste. 'We've gotten e-mails from customers who've purchased scissors in a clamshell, which would require another pair of scissors to open the package,' says Nadia Shouraboura, Amazon's vice president of global fulfillment. Other worthy answers to the Quora question include the interfaces on most microwaves, TV remotes, New York City's parking signs, and pull-handles on push-only doors, but none gained even close to the level of popular repudiation that clamshells received."
I've had plenty of terrible times trying to get things out of plastic clamshells. I've also had no trouble at all... when they don't press seal the entire circumference of the package. If they just use a couple press locks (maybe with a touch of adhesive or a staple), these packages aren't bad at all. Why they insist on hermetically sealing them, though, that is baffling to me.
The nice thing about clamshell packaging is that it clearly displays the product itself, and usually so you can see most or all the sides of the product. This is in many ways better than a cardboard box with a couple of printed pictures on the outside.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has pried open a cardboard box in a store to get to the product inside to see what it actually looked like. Clamshell designs largely prevent that.
The fix is to make them possible to open by hand. Many clamshell packages have a perforated panel on the back you can simply pull open. That's a pretty good design.
I got a handy little tool from Think Geek called "The Plastic Surgeon" that works pretty well.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Use a can opener.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
...and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out.
Not to mention the estimate 6,000 - 7,000 people a year who get cut badly enough to seek treatment in emergency rooms!
If we're down to the 'several thousand' of a particular injury per year then we're in the territory of injuries due to contact with spacecraft (ICD 10 code WX849OXA), initial turtle attacks (W5921XA) or repetitive turtle attacks (W5921XD) and other similarly major dangers to civilization.
Not to worry.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Lamps have infuriating and nonsensical design problems.
1. The switch is almost always put in the most inaccessible of places: behind the lamp shade where you can't see it, can't peek around the shade if the light is on because it's too bright, can't peek around the shade if the light is off because it's too dark, and if you feel around with your fingers you risk being burned by the bulb. Also, most table lamps are set in a position where you really need a second elbow to be able to reach under, across, and back up to reach the switch. A sensible lamp switch should always be visible.
2. Inconsistent activation methods: you've got knobs, pull strings, little pins to push, sometimes levers. Your own lamps you get used to often enough, but any new lamp is always a mystery and takes far too much investigation just to figure out how it works. Particularly when the lever is entirely hidden (see #1 above). A sensible switch mechanism should be obvious at a glance.
3. Poor durability. Despite the fact that every lamp has basically exactly one moving part, that part breaks or jams far too often. I can't tell you how many lamps I've thrown away because the activator either bound up so tightly you can't turn it anymore, or became so loose turning it didn't work the mechanism. A device with a single moving part should have a well-designed part that continues to move appropriately for decades without problem.
4. Poor usability. The activator device is almost always more complicated or less efficient than it needs to be. So many lamps have knobs that are tiny, thin little sticks, which makes it almost impossible to rotate them. (This is the type that invariably binds up, making the situation worse). You should have nice, big knobs or easy-to-grip dongles on the end to take advantage of applied force and angular rotation - it's much easier to turn a screwdriver than a screw, and easier still to turn a wrench than a screwdriver. Most knobs also only rotate one direction, which means if the knob is positioned on the left side of the lamp for righties or the right side of the lamp for lefties, you either need an awkward reach around or to reposition the lamp to rotate the darn thing - not terrible if you only ever reach in from one position, but difficult if you approach the lamp from different angles (both sides of a desk, say, or if one person in the house is a righty and the other a lefty). The push pins are just as bad: you need your hand on one side of the lamp to turn it on, but your hand has to to to the other side of the lamp to turn it off, and you have to fumble around to figure out which side has the pin sticking out. The beaded draw strings are really lousy about catching and jamming. Compared to another very popular on/off switch -- the common wall-mounted light switch -- all of these are badly inferior. I've never, ever had a light switch fail on me, but lamp switches break all the time. (Even the average power button - press once for on and press again for off - is vastly superior.)
5. They're unnecessarily loud. Again, compare to a normal wall-mounted light switch which works silently, the average lamp is surprisingly noisy as it clicks or clacks. I've woken up my wife turning off the bedside lamp at night, and there are enough times that my baby -- in another room, behind two closed doors -- wakes up as I turn off the light that I suspect she can hear it. This is *not* an unusually loud lamp; just the normal sudden clacking is enough in a dark and quiet space to startle someone.
6. Added to the noise is the fact that most lamp shades simply will NOT stay tightened, and also spin and rattle when they inevitably come loose. Being able to change a shade is a valuable option, but I'd say I change one shade a decade. With approximately ten lamps in the house, that means the average lamp shade life span is about a century. Even disregarding that loose math, the default behavior should clearly favor being fixed in place. Much better that it's hard to remove the shade th
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