Product designer Richard Seymour identifies eleven terrible creations that blight our everyday lives
“We put up with the most unbelievable crap every day,” says Richard Seymour. That may explain why, as co-founder of product design agency Seymourpowell, he has spent 25 years redesigning our lives. From the cordless kettle to watches and motorbikes, there’s not much he hasn’t done. But there are still plenty of things he doesn’t like. Here, he tells DCM about his least favourite everyday designs – and one great one that got away…
Most hospital equipment
Want to add to your already advanced anxiety? Take the average hospital bed, gurney, furniture… even floor covering. It says ‘I am a purely functional piece of torture equipment. I have had any compassionate emotion wrung from my form by bean-counters and specification geeks, and I care not a jot for your pain…’
The Alessi Sapper kettle
How can something that looks so nice, from such a clever designer, be so functionally rubbish? The trigger that opens the spout runs at 8,000°C. If you want to find a kitchen style victim, look for the Sapper tattoo on their inner index finger.
The laces on deck shoes
It takes a lot of cunning to produce a device which, if tied normally, will untie itself instantaneously, yet if tied by a dyspeptic deck hand with a triple bowline knot, will wait for the last five seconds as you approach the traffic lights on your bicycle before it loops itself around the pedals.
Dipsticks
It’s the 21st century, for crying out loud!
McDonald’s McSeating
Those benches along the sides, with the inviting curves that reward you with a fractured coccyx when you sit down and remind you after three minutes that it’s time to go. The furniture is reasonably functional, it’s the fact they say ‘welcome’ and then ‘piss off’ just as you’re finishing your reduced-fat salad that reveals the iron machine behind the grinning clown.
Razors
Who’d have thought that we’d get to the 21st century, and still be hacking great lumps off ourselves in the name of ’good grooming’.
It’s a nonsense to me that we’re still in the dark ages on male depilation and it’s about time we started thinking about it in a new way.
Kitchen bins
Emptying a kitchen bin ranks alongside changing nappies and open heart surgery for one of the messiest things you could ever want to do.
Public urinals
What happens when you direct a high-pressure stream of fluid at a hard surface? It bounces back at you, jackass!
Supermarket trolleys
The humble trolley suffers from abuse, which is why it is often errant. But a piece of public kit like this is bound to come in for some heavy stick, so the next generation needs to take the abuse more into account.
Milk cartons with foil lids
A flawless example of designing for ease of manufacture while utterly ignoring the consumer. Can you imagine what the world’s dry cleaning bill looks like due to this abomination?
Corned beef can
Only a cluster bomb is more dangerous. Just what you want: a deep tissue incision laced with organic particles.
My favourite design is…
Cellopore, the amazing plastic bag
The Millennium Product which, when placed in a filthy puddle, would draw the pathogen-riddled water into its interior, cleaning it as it went. The 21st century’s biggest need, clean water, solved. And where is this miracle now? Nowhere. That’s not just a crime, it’s incomprehensible.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 3, Winter 2007