Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/30/non-designers-design-a-super.html
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What makes the designers of these drain plugs “non-designers”?
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I find it’s easier just to be completely hairless. Granted, my neighbors insist I start shaving indoors, but they only complain about the journey, not the results.
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They don’t work as designers, so they are considered amateurs?
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Somebody invents something…and how, exactly, does that equal a failure for the entirety of (trained) designers?
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They obviously do work as designers, as they have designed a commercial product. If you mean it wasn’t their primary income stream until this product, then I would guess there are quite a few “designers” who are actually baristas.
In any event, as @noadz points out, this really falls more under the category of “invention” rather than “design”. Next thing you know, someone will describe what they did as “hack a drain”.
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Musicians: Do your feewings get hurt when somebody who didn’t go to school to study music writes a hi9t song?
Accountants: Are you angry when people do their own taxes?
Architects: Don’t you just hate it when the Amish raise their own damn barns?
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That works if you don’t have the type of tub drain with a pop-up integral plug. Sadly, I don’t think there is a truly good strainer device for tubs with that type of drain plug. I’ve been using the OXO domed silicone rubber strainer, but it only catches about half the hair.
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Now that is an industrial design failure.
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A successful Kickstarter campaign is not the indicator of good design. There have been many successful campaigns for items that were never produced or that failed miserably when actually used. The real question is: does it work?
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What an asinine thing for Core77 to say. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Being a college-trained industrial designer doesn’t somehow unlock the ability to think of ideas, it gives you the tools to make those ideas reality more skillfully and a better chance of being in a job position to do so.
I’m a college-trained graphic designer. If I see a cool design that I wish I’d thought of, I don’t care if the designer is also college trained. They designed something, therefore they are a designer. It doesn’t “sting” that people think of cool ideas who didn’t get a degree in the field.
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As a former longhair, who had a longhair roommate, both with hair down to our butts, I am skeptical that cleanup would be as simple as they make it seem with the shorter hairs they show. I mean, definitely better than a normal drain, where you’re pulling multiple feet worth of horrifying wookie snakes out. But still possibly requiring scissors.
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I am not bothered by non-designers who come up with designs that actually work. What bothers me is graphic designers who create artistic renderings of things that could be useful products, except for the small fact that the thing they rendered has no hope of working, as it completely ignores basic engineering principles.
This one is my all time favorite:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/9803275/Window-socket
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But… but… it’s “simple in design”! It says so right there! Can’t some brainypants engineer make it work from a Photoshop rendering? Just look at those realistic drop shadows and reflections.
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Holy carp. And they won an award for that! I can never respect Yanko Design again.
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If I had a power-strip, I could plug in both my fridge and air conditioner!
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Even better, stick it in the window of an electric car and eliminate the need for nightly recharges!
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Wow…anyone want to bother to calculate how much energy they’re wasting right off the top from going from battery to mains back to battery there? It’s not like you could do much but charge a phone on that thing.
That’s the kind of tub drain we have, and my sweetie and I both have long hair 
. There must be something out there that works; I don’t love using drain unclogger every few months.
