I was having lunch in nice restaurant today, and my meal came served in a oblong, curved plate. It was beautifully stylish, very fashionable, and poorly designed. The nice, heavy knife would not stay on the edge of the plate - the weighted handle would pull the knife down the edge of the curve, and the handle would end up in my Chicken Limone. After the third time, I gave up and put the knife on the table.
There is a hand grab bar on my new Ford Escape. It’s above your shoulder if the seat is pushed back. My legs are long so I push the seat well back. I conk my head on the grab bar nearly everytime I go to get out of the drivers seat. It’s covered with some padded stuff. It doesn’t really hurt when I hit it. It’s more of a shock that something came in contact with my head. Dumbest thing ever designed.
On a larger scale, the major freeways through and around the Twin Cities were designed to force traffic to travel in a particular direction so that it would generally take a reasonably short amount of time to get from point A to point B, with minimal traffic jams, provided you were okay with driving entirely around the metro area to get to the other side. This means that if you want to go from, say, northbound 35E in St. Paul to westbound 94 towards Minneapolis, you need to get off the freeway and drive on city streets for five or six blocks, or stay on the freeway and drive an extra 20-30 miles around the metro area. This is repeated in three or four other places around the Twin Cities.
Similarly, if you drive south across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, there is no freeway connection through the city. You have to get off the freeway and drive city streets clear across town (40-50 blocks) to get back onto a freeway (the freeway that was there, the Embarcadero, collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake and wasn’t replaced because landfill).
Combination on/off ramps on freeways. I understand that it saves space in cramped cities, but people trying to slow down while exiting being mixed with people accelerating to get on the freeway is just a bone stupid thing to do.
Six packs of beer in 12 ounce cans, and four packs of the same beer in 16 ounce cans. Man, what the fuck is wrong with six packs of 16 ounce cans? I’m buying bigger cans because I want MORE beer.
Oh, andthis piece of shit.
It’s a Kitchenaid/whirlpool ice maker. If you have one, you know what I’m talking about.
Tall cans used to come in six packs. I always preferred that size.
I’m not sure when they started the 4 packs. Couldn’t have been more than a few years ago. I remember buying a Tall six pack a couple years ago.
I find tilted sidewalks very poorly designed.
There’s one close to a relatives house. It has to be almost 30 degrees. Maybe more.
She’s in a wheelchair and enjoys a walk around the neighborhood. Me pushing. 
Her chair won’t roll straight on that tilted sidewalk. Takes all the strength I have to hold it straight. I worry my hands will slip off the handles and she’ll go flying.
I’ve started pushing in the street on that section of the block. It’s low traffic and safer.
Being left-handed, I’m constantly assaulted by stuff made for a right-handed world. That’s why I’ve never understood the design fora typical flush toilet, a urinal, or for that matter, a Flushometer. The only semblance of an answer I could find was, “in the old days with high tank models, the chain was on the left, so right-handed people could pull the chain while sitting on the toilet.”
Does every right-handed person flush while sitting?
Water dispensers where the fill tank and the faucet are on different sides of the container instead of being on the same side. Generally when I fill a 2-5 gallon dispenser and put it inside my fridge or in storage I keep the faucet pointing upwards so in case there’s a leak it doesn’t start slowleaking the entire time. However the filling hole is also a point of leakage so you might end up in a situation where both sides leak and now you have to figure out which leaks less, as opposed to putting them both on the side side so you can just point them both upwards and not worry about it.
I feel your pain. When my wheelchair-bound father comes to visit, I have to get him from my car to my apartment.
I live on a lovely, picturesque, quaint, quiet street in Brooklyn. The sidewalk is made out of blocks of slate, not the usual NYC concrete. It’s very pretty. Unfortunately, decades (more like a century, actually) of weather has done quite a bit of damage.
The street, however, is cobblestone, and in even worse shape than the sidewalk, so pushing him in the street isn’t an option.
I don’t think it’s fair to say this is “poor design,” though. It’s just wear and tear and weather.
This. The ice maker in my freezer somehow got a piece of a plastic bag wrapped around the shaft. It’s in an inaccessible location, and no matter what I do, I can’t get it unwound or removed. I had to disable the ice maker and use ice trays.
Up until a few years ago, when you paid your fare on London buses, you were given a ticket printed off a roll of paper as you boarded. You were meant to retain this during the journey as, on very rare occasions, an inspector might board the bus and inspect your ticket to deter fare cheats. The style of bus which served my local route came with a handy-dandy receptacle by the exit doors into which you could toss your used ticket as you got off. Brilliantly simple solution to a littering problem - EXCEPT one of the folding door panels would neatly cover the receptacle when the doors were opened :smack:
Thankfully, this is at least now understood, and is a huge no-no when building anything new. It’s just massively expensive to fix all the old examples.
In many places, needing both hands to open or lock your front door is considered a defect on the part of either the door or the lock. Both in the UK and in France I’ve run into locks and, in the case of the UK, inner doors, which you can only open and close with both hands (different mechanisms); they consider it a safety feature, but it’s ableist and, in the case of the UK (where some doors required my 1’62m/5’4" self needed to stand on tiptoe), heightist.
There’s a metal teapot that’s very popular in Spanish bars. Nastiest little teapot on Earth; whomever designed it doesn’t seem to have been very clear on either the concept of “liquid” or that of “hot”.
At the very least, a combination of poor design and poor maintenance. Sidewalks in the “modern side” of my home town haven’t gotten the tiles changed in over 50 years (for the “old side” it ranges between decades and a century); the places with large slabs are the ones with worse wear and tear.
Hey, it’s fun to discuss stuff here at the Sdope.
But sometimes, it’s just easier to link to someplace else…
with really, really good examples of what this thread is all about:
Complete with pics and animated gifs
The kitchen sink and dish drainer in my flat; it’s a pretty small flat, and someone obviously decided that a small round sink and drainer would look better and be a space saving measure. Equally obviously, the designer doesn’t wash up much; the sink is only just big enough to fit a full size plate. Want to wash a tray? Sink’s round, so you can’t even fit it in diagonally. The drainer, also being round, obviously can’t attach run along the edge of the sink, so there’s a big gap between the two that serves no purpose other than filling with drips.
My son’s Subaru.
It’s a great car, but they didn’t think things through very well.
Chief complaint is the backup camera which doesn’t dim at night. It blinds the driver with a must-be-visible-at-high-noon setting and reduces safety rather than enhances it. After 3 years of ownership, none of us nor the dealer could figure out how to dim it. He keeps a towel on the passenger seat to throw over the display at night.
Second complaint, too many of the switches are not illuminated at night, and require fumbling around (and the use of a small flashlight) to find.
I think the car was designed without much thought to night time use. It’s a shame, because otherwise it’s a wonderful machine.
In almost every car, the gap between center console and seat is perfect to swallow any car keys, change or cell phone which might slide out of your pocket or otherwise get anywhere near it - this gap also has some sort of gravitational anomaly, attracting exactly those things you don’t have time for to recover, by pulling over the car, exiting, and locating from the rear seat.
After decades of this, you’d think they designed this away by now. But of course not.
My alarm clock that changes the hour and minutes with a single touch of buttons that are in between and identical to the other buttons.
Squeezable relish and mayo plastic bottles.
iPhone charging cables, both the old 30 pin and lightning cables.