designapalooza’s posterous

The pop tab addition to soup cans (and other cans) is, in my mind, quite a handy addition. Although soda cans have had these for years, it apparently took designers a few years to catch on and add it food cans as well. Last night a friend of mine tried to open a can of chili with my swiss army knife, and was lucky to not lose a finger. The jagged leftovers were quite sharp, and the process took quite a while. A can opener solves this problem, but you need to have one - requiring two tools to perform one task, something the tab eliminates. Sometimes I think the simplest design upgrades are the hardest to find when looking at traditional activities that have been ingrained into instinct over long periods of time. If it ain't broke, that doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't room for improvement.

Advantages:
Don't need the sometimes hard to find can opener
Edges are a little less sharp then can opener-opened cans (say that 5 times fast)

Disadvantages:
Requires a little more material?

Athena printers as we all know are the printers located in one of many Athena Clusters dispersed around MIT campus. Even though MIT has been very generous with providing the students with free access to such printers for educational purposes, it always fails to meet my needs. More specifically, the athena printers on the 5th floor of student centers are always entrenched with reasons to not print your files effectively: ink-less cartridges, long-lines of people gathered around the one that works, flashing red lights and bold error messages, etc. To make it more difficult the unix system commonly used on Athena stations has programs that are not strictly compatible with pc or mac based files generated on our laptops. As a result, in the rarest case that an athena printer is ready to print, here comes a .pdf incompatibility issue that freezes the printer and makes you boggled with wishful illusional anticipation that the file will printer in the next coming seconds. Or even worse, you get this person who hit the 'print' tab a mili-second sooner that you, and is patiently collecting the 100 page leisure reading he/she has founded on the internet and wished to print just for the hell of it!
 
If I were to improve the user-functionality of athena printers I would first change it to run primarily on windows or mac based interfaces. In addition, I would put a printing cap in a given timeline. For example, each athena user is only allowed to print 50 pages per hour. More so, I would have liked to see a person available in the most populated athena clusters (i.e. student center location) to answer questions and be able to help in the case of printing chaos.
 
Avid

I was walking to school the other day in snowy boston, and was imagining how unbearable it would be if I did not have gloves on for the winters in Boston. As it is commonly known, hand gloves is a type of garment that covers the
hand; it could accomplish multiple needs and purposes, and can come in various shapes, colors, and materials. For example, gloves can be used for protecting your hands against cold weather, hazardous chemicals, etc. For the purpose of this post I will only focus on winter gloves. Even though winter gloves are amazingly practical for keeping one's hands warm, it makes the user incapable of any activity that necessitates tactility. For example, when walking in the streets in the midst of the winter the process of taking your cell phone and responding to a call is daunting and impractical. A solution to meet this need would be to design and develop very thin-skinned winter gloves with a material composition that provides high insulation and enhances activities that demand tactility.
 
Avid

BY: HERACLIO HERNANDEZ

Since I was a kid I had a problem with mechanical pencils, but not all mechanical pencils just the nice ones with the caps on the eraser.  The main problem is that the caps fall off all the time.  A consequences of the cap issue is that that the eraser falls off when its in my backpack and the lead breaks.  On top of everything the eraser gets dirty and leaves smudges when I erase. Most of the time the caps usually get permanently lost. So now the nice pen with a cap that I paid extra for is no longer the as nice as it was when I first bought it.  After the eraser falls off once it is never the same again; it wears a little and it falls off easier the next time.  There should be a much better system of protecting the eraser.  An easy flip cover would probably suffice.  The images shows a new blue pencil with the eraser still covered and the other one is what it will eventually look like.

   

Click here to download:

High_tech_graphite_loses_it_pr.zip (3889 KB)

As far as this product goes, I would not recommend anyone buying it. Simply,
this shower container is an overpriced product sold at the Coop, bought
foolishly about a year and a half ago. With it's triangular shape, it is true
that it provides more room than the competing products, but for a price that I
believe at the time was around $ 8, I think that with some imagination much
cheaper solutions can be thought of.
 
The product in itself has it's functional flaws. The two that come to my head
are the fact that due to the triangular shape, the cuffs do not get enough
suction to the wall due to the product's weight, so that the holder can only be
placed on the floor. Somewhat curious as the product comes with 4 plastic cuffs
to attach it to the wall, which is more than the necessary amount. The second
fault is that, as the square holes only begin 1 inch off the floor in this
holder, a bit of volume of water can accumulate at the bottom of the holder,
releasing once u finish the shower in the dry floor of the bathroom.
 
This product is not completely useless though. If you are like me, then the
shower holder makes a great container for all types of lose chains and coins.
You simply divide the change into dimes, nickels, pennies, and quarters, place
them in zip lock bags, and put them next to one another inside the holder. So
far I've spent a year doing this, and I can say I am quite satisfied.
 
- Jose

One of the most annoying and perhaps saddest components of the HP laptop
Pavilion is the location of it's heating vents.
 
Situated right under the LCD screen, the heating vents actually successfully
heat up most of the computer in about 10 minutes, making it inadequate to hold
and somewhat of a pain to use. The rubber stands with which it comes actually
fall as the adhesive is melted by the glue, and over time the computer's
capability to heat up gets faster and much more inconvenient.
 
As you can probably tell, this has happened to me. The end result was that the
computer got to such a degree of heat that it ended melting the plastic of the
closing mechanism for the LCD screen. Now, the laptop is very inaccessible, and
it must wear a duct tape "band-aid" at all points.
 
The HP Pavilion design fails, although from my recent laptop purchase, they did
notice the problem and successfully lifted the LCD screen an inch away from the
heating vent, although that is not going to convince me to buy one still.
 
- Jose

White boards have revolutionized temporary writing; in many classrooms,
they have replaced traditional chalkboards, not to mention the endless
hallways, doors, and conference rooms that sport them. And where there
are white boards, the Expo marker reigns.
 
These things are designed quite well; to avoid losing the indispensable
cap, they can be affixed to the marker's reverse end when writing.
Chiseled tips allow different widths to be marked on the surfaces. And,
of course, the ink is nontoxic and erasable.
 
The only design change I would suggest is something that the makers of
the Sharpie permanent marker have already thought of; 'clicky' extension
and withdrawal of the tip, much like ballpoint pens. I believe t is
definitely possible to implement this on Expo markers.
 
- Wei