IH01-UmberMasood

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

[edit] Good Designs and Bad Designs in Our Everyday Lives

[edit] Example of Good Design

Figure 1: Sandals

One example of good design from everyday objects is the soles of the pair of sandals in Figure 1. In the picture, the top shoe shows the raised dots on the sole and the lower shoe in the picture shows how the shoe looks like when right side up. The raised rubber dots make these sandals comfortable to wear. These dots are the aspect of the shoes that make them have good design. Many people complain that their sandals are too flat, which leads to sore feet. The rubber dots on these shoes help solve that by raising the shoe further from the floor. Also, the dots add a relatively minimal amount of weight to the shoe compared to if another layer of rubber was added to the sole. Thus, the makers of the shoe made the sandals practical for frequent use by keeping the sandals lightweight. Overall, the raised rubber dots on the soles of this pair of sandals make the shoes both comfortable to wear and light in weight.

[edit] Example of Bad Design

Figure 2: Cell phone with ear piece

Figure 3: Ear piece

One example of bad design from everyday objects is the design of the ear piece that goes with a cell phone, as shown in Figure 2 and with a close up in Figure 3. The ear piece is supposed to stay in the ear while the speaker is talking on the phone. However, the ear piece only stays in the ear as long as the speaker does not move his or her head. Yet a person speaking on a cell phone may be moving around, and when he or she does so, the ear piece falls out of the ear. The aspect of the ear piece that it does not stay in the ear makes the ear piece have a bad design.

The ear piece might have been designed this way because it is a simple design. The ear piece performs the action it was designed to perform: it acts as a speaker when put in the ear. The design seems to work until it is put to actual use. Although the ear piece does perform the action it was designed to, the designers did not consider that there may be some difficulty with keeping the ear piece in the ear.

I suggest adding a clip-like object to the ear piece. The ear piece can then be clipped to the ear and the user will not need to worry about the ear piece falling out. Figure 4 has a suggestion for a better design.

Figure 4: Suggested improvement to ear piece