[Closed] Nominations for the worst bit of design ever.

And the winner - the €

I'm honoured. 😉

Winston has a point but as a designer, fulfilling a clients a badly thought out or short sighted brief doesn't make it an adequate design. All it means means is you will get paid and for most designers that's the main goal.

My nomination isn't a product as such and does has some great touches, but considering the designers other remarkable creations, i'm at a loss as to what was going on here*. Mother nature, WTF?

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*Only thing i can think of is an archeological prank. I mean, arms that can't reach any other part of the body?

Those daft toilet doors on trains that, unless you know which magic combination actually closes and locks the door, actually open to reveal the user on the pot.

There must be a name for the anticipatory terror experienced when nature forces one to use these monstrous piss-tardis exposé traps. You can't help twitching and looking wide-eyed at the door for the whole duration.

Please bring back old railway carriages, with wood, and ashtrays, and corridors, and little brass handles.

Gnome3.

Completely baffling. In the old days it had a "Hibernate" menu option to hibernate your machine. But in Gnome3 they decided that this feature was too "advanced" so it got removed. After a day of googling around I eventually found the configuration file you had to manually edit to re-enable it. And the rest is just as bad. There's some funky configuration thing you have to install and poke around with to make it work, but life is just too short. Aaarrgh!

Gnome2 used to be great, but I'm living with Xfce now because it's not Gnome or Kde.

The car.

IN 1885 Karl Benz constructed the first automobile.

It had three wheels, like an invalid car,

And ran on alcohol, like many drivers.

Since then about seventeen million people have been killed by them

In an undeclared war;

And the whole of the rest of the world is in danger of being run over

Due to squabbles about their oil.

If an alien was to hover a few hundred yards above the planet

It could be forgiven for thinking

That cars were the dominant life-form,

And that human beings were a kind of ambulatory fuel cell:

Injected when the car wished to move off,

And ejected when they were spent.

[url= http://peoplesgeography.com/2006/10/18/autogeddon-one-of-my-fav-poems/ ]'Autogeddon'[/url] (excerpt) by Heathcote Williams

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Chiller cabinets without doors. Honestly, even before the green agenda really got going you'd have shops spending money on leccy to run the chillers whilst cranking the heating up so the staff didn't walk out. Barmy.

I work in retail construction and it is the one thing that always gets me. The client I work for will spend a fortune on green initiatives that will never really pay back, but avoid the obvious one for fear of it impacting on sales. Even the companies that make the refrig equipment keep telling them to add doors to save shed loads but they won't. If all the supermarkets did it, then customers would have no choice but to open a door!

It's not do much the staff that whine it's cold....it's the customers. As a result you have an open topped fridge / freezer with heaters underneath heating the isle. No one seems to see anything wrong with this apparently!

And yes those light bulbs are awful.

I'd also like to nominate buttons on baby grows....why? When you have a fidgety baby, buttons are the obvious thng to make life easy!

Knees.

Proof that the creationists idea of Intelligent Design is tosh wallops.
'Lets connect the two bits that let you run away from hungry beasts together with stretchy string, and cover the bits the touch in mildly tough jelly?'
'Now lets design the rest of the body to outlast them'

Combining a recline function and tray back table on an airline seat.

What could possibly go wrong? Giving one person the ability to tip scalding hot drinks into another person's lap by being selfish.

by being selfish.

I'd say designing a seat that you expect someone to sit in for 10 or 12 hours bolt upright where the only crumb of relief you can get is by reclining it slightly but risk being called selfish for doing so is bad design in itself. Yes, I know why (squeezing us all in to reduce costs/increase profits) but it's still not good enough.

I mean, arms that can't reach any other part of the body?

...you have to stop to see what is there in order to decide whether to give way...

I absolutely agree, but why do you need a sign? Give way is what you're doing, and if it's necessary for you to stop, then stop
It's like putting "Fog" on motorway signs. Really? Is that what that thick grey blanket obscuring my view is?

The problem is that people get nannied, if they [u]had [/u]to think then we might do a bit better

(and of course I'm a better driver than average, all motorists are)

High-heeled shoes in general. But this:

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I'm not sure T-rex qualifies for bad design - It was a top predator and around for 2.5 million years - homosapien has only been here for 500,000 so far.

My top nomination would be most houses that have been built since the 30's. The design faults in our dwellings are so legion I don't know where to start.

After looking at iolo's thread about the phone dock/dog I'll nominate this. After all everyone needs a 3.5m high docking station in their lives.

http://jarre.com/products/jarre-technologies/aerodream-one

I would just like to point out that I am not responsible for any of these.

Yet.

And I shall be revisiting the thread.....when I've finished designing cheap solar garden lights for manufacture in China. 😀

Give way is what you're doing, and if it's necessary for you to stop, then stop

if they had to think then we might do a bit better

Its a stop sign its not complicated to work out what to do at it.
Its not an option its an instruction.

The button fly. Whoever thought that was a good idea was obviously never troubled by needing to go for a leak with numb fingers on a cold day.

The button fly.

Similarly, the fly on my jeans which has a little zipper garage flap into which the pull on the zipper slips while you're pissing and is then almost irretrievable, certainly without looking completely ridiculous.

I'd say designing a seat that you expect someone to sit in for 10 or 12 hours bolt upright where the only crumb of relief you can get is by reclining it slightly but risk being called selfish for doing so is bad design in itself. Yes, I know why (squeezing us all in to reduce costs/increase profits) but it's still not good enough.

I should probably qualify this. The act of reclining the seat is not selfish, but at least 50% of the people I have sat behind just recline their seat without even looking, let alone asking if it is ok. That's the selfish bit.

Original conti mountain kings.

Too thin, too tight on the rim, and triangular tread blocks just sliced through the dirt rather than gripping it. The worst tyres I have ever bought.

This bit of design quickly became very bad when rifles appeared.........

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The bright white webbing cross on the front makes a handy aiming point as well.

Shimano dual control. A crap solution to a non-existent problem.

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*note to self: never design anything for DannyH* 8)

*note to self: never design anything for DannyH*

You can. Just make sure it's not crap!

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Did you spill my pint?

Technically, yes, but I just leant on the bar a metre away, physics did the rest.

Shame they overlooked one small exhaust port.........

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Shame they overlooked one small exhaust port.........

I have it in confidence that the Imperial design brief originally neglected to specify 'at least half the size of a womp rat and protected in both directions by blast shields'

I'd totally go with the rightangled scart lead, and its accomplice, appliances with horizontal scart lead sockets- a combination perfectly designed to pull the cables out of the TV. Most French thing ever

I like Shimano dual control.

I'd totally go with the rightangled scart lead, and its accomplice, appliances with horizontal scart lead sockets- a combination perfectly designed to pull the cables out of the TV. Most French thing ever

Now that most people wall mount their tellies now (not me - CRT til I die or at least until flat telly stop being too ugly to look at) then I'd also nominate tellies where non of the leads can be plugged in or unplugged once the tv is fixed to the wall.

[quote=Mostly Balanced ]The button fly. Whoever thought that was a good idea was obviously never troubled by needing to go for a leak with numb fingers on a cold day.

What other options do you think the designer of that had?

I'm fairly sure this was a bad idea.

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I do want to make a nice Cnc machined, cartridge bearing toilet seat hinge with slow close damper.
One day.

My chest right now seems the most infection prone thing ever. Crap design.

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There's never enough water to wash off the soap, but you can't trigger the water again without getting yet more soap on your hands. Piss poor.

On closer examination it seems this one uses push buttons, it is the auto ones I am on about.

Magnetic entry cat flap:

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Doesn't work, cat can't get in, and has to wait outside. What it is very good at is picking up random metallic objects onto the collar.

.. and cats seem to be able to lose the magnets within 5 minutes of them being attached to their collar.

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Anyone with a child will know what I mean.

Toy restrained in a box like it's Chucky himself? Check.

Demo mode that's nice and quiet that gives way to ear splitting volume once toy is activated? Check.

Can't turn toy off. Check.

Can't use the volume function in certain 'play' modes? Check.

Can't take a ****ing telling and continues to beg for attention when even the small gremlin has tired of it? Check.

We are a supposedly advanced and intelligent species and we waste our ****ing lives deigning and buying shit like that??? WTF?

Vtech is a scam. A plastic shite toy pretend laptop that bleeps, has a tiny screen and plays a handful of awful games is like £100, when a real android tablet with 100x the power can be had for £90.

But it's "you know.. For kids!" So people cough up.

Any bike light with a single button that cycles through the modes, where someone decides that we need more than simply high and low.

My old ones were really irritating as they went high/medium/low/flash/high, the new ones (C&B Seen) are better as they just have high/medium/low, but a double click to switch low to high turns on the strobe setting. If it just had high and low, it would be one click to change mode, double click for strobe.

A huge amount of software out there. Travel agents seem to be the worst. Who knows why people think it is acceptable or the way it should be.

brant - Member

I do want to make a nice Cnc machined, cartridge bearing toilet seat hinge with slow close damper.
One day.

Vtech is a scam. A plastic shite toy pretend laptop that bleeps, has a tiny screen and plays a handful of awful games is like £100, when a real android tablet with 100x the power can be had for £90.

But it's "you know.. For kids!" So people cough up.

Tell me about it, mine is getting a laptop with the wifi disabled and some sort of child friendly linux distro. 1000x better than the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC6128 I had to live with (but no Roland in Time or Percy Penguin so maybe I win anyway).

4 pages in and no mention of Superstar brake pads or the Singletrack app?

My nomination for crap design is......toilet paper.

Is there a country in the world whereby a bidet is not considered a normal part of bathroom furniture, and with good reason ? Seems our culture is a bit too up our own bottom to accept them, so instead we waste forests in a poor attempt to solve a problem which comes back to haunt you at the most awkward times anyway. Terrible idea....

Bidet?

Like to see the reasoning behind that. How much energy do you think it takes to pump water? What's the carbon footprint once you factor in pressure loss in the pipe, energy conversion loss at the pump, transmission losses for the power transmission and thermal losses at the generation site? For the sake of getting a wet arse that you then need to dry, expending more energy. Oh, and you have to heat the water too unless you like bollocks the size of peanuts.

At least energy can be recovered from used paper in anaerobic digesters before it's used as fertiliser.