IH01-HAK-SEUNG KIM
From IEOR 170 Spring 2007
Good Design
We often use ketchup to make food taste better. Originally, ketchup bottle was a glass. However, with a glass bottle, people experience hard time to pour the ketchup on the food because of ketchup’s chemical properties. Later, polyethylene squeeze bottle was introduced to get ketchup out. Even though we have a better design, we still have a problem. We always make upside down to pour the ketchup. When there is little ketchup remained in the bottle, we always have hard time to squeeze the bottle to get ketchup out. Why do we always need to make upside down? Here is a good design to solve my question. This bottle is already upside down, so we do not need make upside down action to pour. Also, there is another feature that make clean the cap. It is a drip free valve. It shapes like crosses on the center of the hole and prevents massy on the cap.
Bad Design
I want to introduce one bad designed product that always makes me uncomfortable when I use it. That is my stapler. A stapler is a product that binds together sheet of papers. There is a pin inside the stapler, and it comes out to bind together sheet of papers when I press the top of the stapler. However, if I want to staple more than fifteen papers, the pin does not bind the paper completely. So, I need extra work to take the pin out and do it again and again. I think the space between top and bottom is unnecessary wide. It seems that more than 100 papers can be stapled. But, only 15 papers can be stapled. We do need extra failures to figure out how many pages we can staple out. It is a bad design.
Is there any improvement for the bad designed stapler?
Yes. As I complained before, there is unnecessarily wide space between top and bottom of the stapler. It seems that more than 100 papers can be stapled. But, only 15 papers can be stapled. My idea is that we can make this space narrow enough for amount of papers we can staple. If the sheets of paper do not fit into the stapler, this means you cannot staple the papers out. If the sheets of paper fit into the stapler, this means you can staple the paper without any failure.
