Bad design. No donut!

[unixronin]

It appears Fujitsu ran a "future design" contest.  And C|Net ran a pictorial on the winners.

This is the first winner.

I think I can say with complete confidence that whoever designed this "cane" has never needed to use one.  Not only is this thing almost completely useless as a cane, it looks like a repetitive-stress injury (probably to the carpal tunnel) waiting to happen.  It's comparable to all these design-school motorcycle "concepts" designed by people who have never ridden a motorcycle and don't understand the first thing about how one works, and which it's usually obvious at the first glance would be completely unrideable.

I don't care how high-tech and sexy your "design" looks.  Make some effort to learn a little about whatever it is you're trying to come up with a new design for, before you whip out your copy of Illustrator and just start making shit up.  This is not a mobility aid for a disabled person; it's a bloody fashion accessory.

Comments

[merlinpendragon]

I totally agree with your take on this.

[unixronin]

Say, jog my memory ... did I send my spare Radeon graphics card to you? Rounding up some stuff for a friend and trying to confirm whether I still have a spare Radeon card to put in the box or not.

[merlinpendragon]

That would be the one with the fan, right? I can send them both back if someone else needs it. Turns out my GeForce 6300 is working fine now that we got the CPU & hard drive issues handled.

[unixronin]

Uhh... I thought I recalled it was a fanless card, actually. I sent you two cards? Guess my memory was in error. Losing track of what spare parts I'm sending where. :) Memory's the second thing to go....

The friend I was planning to send graphics cards to got his main problem solved last night .... turned out he installed from a baselayout 1.2 stage3 tarball, got upgraded to baselayout 2.0.2 from portage, and nothing told him he needed to run dispatch-conf. I think he does still need some parts though, but mainly server hardware. I'll have to check.

[merlinpendragon]

Yes, you sent me 2 cards. One has a fan, the other doesn't, and both are Maxtor.

[unixronin]

Maxtor? I think you mean Matrox. Funny, coulda sworn they were both fanless...

[merlinpendragon]

You're right about the name. I'm trying to type with one eye covered (been bugging me for over a week) and it's getting hard to catch my letter-switching when I type.

[auntie_m]

My wrist hurts just looking at it. And I just occasionally twist my knee or ankle.
I don't even think they consulted any physical therapists either.
Hopefully, before this atrocity comes out and is forced on us, someone from PT will tell them where to shove it.
*shudder*

[robhansen]

What immediately jumps out to me about this is, "but we already have canes of the future, right now!"

The cane has been around for literally a few hundred thousand years, if not more. The amount of human-factors engineering that's gone into it is absolutely beyond human imagining. Billions of people have used canes and given feedback. This means our current designs are within epsilon of perfection -- at least as perfect as mass-produced devices can be for a tool that is ultimately best when crafted to fit a particular person's needs at a particular point in time.

If you were to assign me to design "the X of the future!", I would start by designing something that hasn't already gone through a few hundred thousand design iterations.

[unixronin]

You have an excellent point. When you come down to it, MOST simple devices have at this point been developed and refined and tweaked until about all there is left to do is polish the rivets. Look at the hammer, for example ... it's evolved into a number of different specialized forms, the forging hammer, the carpenter's claw hammer, the geologist's sampling hammer, the machinist's ball-peen hammer, but none of them has really evolved significantly in probably a hundred years beyond changing the handle material. The saw? Well, people keep coming out with different incremental variations on tooth form and materials, but a saw is a saw is a saw. There have been refinements for specific uses, like the ultra-thin-blade Japanese saws that cut on the pull stroke, or the "toothless" structured tungsten carbide blade for cutting ultra-hard materials like ceramic tile, but all the significant advances in cutting things in the last fifty years have been in bladeless alternate cutting tools like plasma cutters, water jets, and lasers.