The bad design of an everyday thing
Jan. 16th, 2007 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsA couple of weeks ago my company replaced the existing set of coffee carafes with a new set. The old set was very beat up and probably deserved replacing, although there were no leaks and no noticeable degredation in performance.
Ever since then, however, getting coffee has come with an added level of stress. When pouring yourself a cup of coffee, I'll press down on the dispense lever and the machine may or may not dispense some coffee but, long before it reaches a full eight ounce cup it starts to cough and sputter. It's out. For some reason when that happens, my stress level seems to shoot upward dramatically and I curse the damned thing. This is an almost universal reaction to the new carafes; everyone feels this way about them, but nobody is quite sure why. This never happened with the old carafes. I've figured out what makes them stressful.
The new carafes are hydraulically fed. You pump a lever to push air into the carafe chamber, which in turn pushed the coffee out. In the old carafes, it was gravity fed: the lever was at the bottom, and you pushed it to open a simple valve that would dump the coffee. I suppose the new carafes, having to hole at the bottom, are less troublesome should a leak develop in the valve, since essentially all that means is that the carafe doesn't work, but at least it doesn't leak either.
The design of the old carafes allowed for a window above the valve that would tell you exactly how much coffee was left. The new ones do not have this feature, and therefore running out of coffee is an unpleasant and stress-inducing surprise.
Sure, you ran out of coffee with the old one, but you knew before you pressed the lever that that was likely to happen. You could even place bets with yourself based upon experience if there was enough left for one more cup. Emptying the carafe was both anticipated and gameable. You also knew, if you had just emptied the carafe, that it was your responsibility to refill it; no such responsibility is communicated with the new ones.
This could all be solved with a simple addition that would probably add two bucks to the manufacturing process: a thin tube flush with the surface of the carafe showing you how much coffee was left. Without it, the carafes seem almost optimally designed to frustrate and stress the user.
Ever since then, however, getting coffee has come with an added level of stress. When pouring yourself a cup of coffee, I'll press down on the dispense lever and the machine may or may not dispense some coffee but, long before it reaches a full eight ounce cup it starts to cough and sputter. It's out. For some reason when that happens, my stress level seems to shoot upward dramatically and I curse the damned thing. This is an almost universal reaction to the new carafes; everyone feels this way about them, but nobody is quite sure why. This never happened with the old carafes. I've figured out what makes them stressful.
The new carafes are hydraulically fed. You pump a lever to push air into the carafe chamber, which in turn pushed the coffee out. In the old carafes, it was gravity fed: the lever was at the bottom, and you pushed it to open a simple valve that would dump the coffee. I suppose the new carafes, having to hole at the bottom, are less troublesome should a leak develop in the valve, since essentially all that means is that the carafe doesn't work, but at least it doesn't leak either.
The design of the old carafes allowed for a window above the valve that would tell you exactly how much coffee was left. The new ones do not have this feature, and therefore running out of coffee is an unpleasant and stress-inducing surprise.
Sure, you ran out of coffee with the old one, but you knew before you pressed the lever that that was likely to happen. You could even place bets with yourself based upon experience if there was enough left for one more cup. Emptying the carafe was both anticipated and gameable. You also knew, if you had just emptied the carafe, that it was your responsibility to refill it; no such responsibility is communicated with the new ones.
This could all be solved with a simple addition that would probably add two bucks to the manufacturing process: a thin tube flush with the surface of the carafe showing you how much coffee was left. Without it, the carafes seem almost optimally designed to frustrate and stress the user.
