Why Some Designs Are Impossible to Improve: Quintessence

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Touch screen on a smartphone makes sense. Because you look right at it 95% of the time when using it. Touch screens in a car, do not make sense. Because you're not supposed to be looking at it.

My parents received a Sunbeam toaster as a wedding gift in 1961. It died in 2015. We were all heartbroken. The new toaster takes too long and don't toast as well.

One of the things that applied to Fordlandia was that Ford took the Midwest house idea so seriously that he even made them all face South, as they do in America, and failed to consider that the reason you do that is to make sure the porch gives plenty of shade in the *Northern Hemisphere*, but Brazilian homes typically face to the North. His cultural jingoism went so far he wouldn't even consider the consequences of a round Earth.

Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY keyboard layout wasn't just some random layout designed to slow you down. Except for S, the home row is alphabetical from left to right -- even moreso in the original version which had M on the end, next to L (later M was moved down to the bottom row). All the vowels except A are on the top row. And the two least commonly used letters, Q and Z, are placed at the left edges, since your left pinkie is one of your weakest fingers. Plus it was a marketing trick to demonstrate the ability to type the word "typewriter" using only keys on the top row.

The reason for Mag-Lites success was that it was a weapon in disguise. While nightsticks could be banned in some areas for being a weapon, a flashlight would not. As noted, even when police where forbidden to use nightsticks they loved carrying a big ass Mag-Lite.

Maybe the 5th element is the friends we made along the way

The QWERTY layout key-jamming story is actually an urban legend created by Dvorak manufacturers to convince people that Dvorak should be objectively better. In reality, QWERTY is the result of incremental design improvements, which started with an alphabetical layout, and gradually moved various keys to locations that made more sense, like moving rarely used keys like Q, Z, and X to the corners. You can actually notice much of the alphabetical order remains, as, with the notable exception of B, the letters A through P are all very close, if not adjacent, to the letters that follow or precede them.

16:50 Damn, Henry Ford really took control to another level. But look at how well he did. 17:10 When you show how he could literally create an entire car from plain ore in barely a day, it really puts into perspective how insane his assembly line speeds were.

Don't forget the classic wooden Pencil with eraser, and the Boston Pencil Sharpener. The helical blade sharpener is the quintessential mechanical sharpener design thats been used in every wall sharpener in schools and offices for the past 100 years.

Please don't stop making these videos man, this stuff is so interesting and applicable, and almost fundamentally something most people aren't meant to think about as much as they should

Shaving is funny example. The safety razor was perfect, and blades only cost a few cents each. The problem is it didn't make people rich, so we invented the Schik Quattro 5 blade + moisturizing blah blah and sell them at $5 a pop

I think the best improvement to a paperclip that we could make would be modifying the cutting portion to slightly round the edges of the cut ends that scrape along the paper. As-is, paperclips kinda tear into the paper if they're holding a few too many pages, and you go to pull the clip off by sliding it (the normal way). If the edges of the cut wire ends of the clip were just a little less sharp at the paper-contacting area, it would drastically improve performance.

Microsoft had made the perfect paper clip, and they just killed it.

The flashlight gained popularity in Germany among taxi drivers, because it was so easily abused as a weapon for self defence. A club or baseball bat was considered a weapon - a massive flashlight on the other hand was just used to help finding houses at night. I know quite a few people that aren't taxi drivers, that had one of those in their car as well. As you say, it's just a confidence booster to know you could defend yourself if there is something happening. Skype during its early days wasn't just a (video-)chat software. It was used in companies to check in on employes too, due to the online status changing by default, if the user was AFK for too long.

One thing about that last bit. Almost all of us already have our phones on vibrate almost all the time. A lot of us turn off a variety of notifications. One thing I could see happening in this space is not a major shift, but a quiet change towards controlling what information is presented to us. This will probably not resolve the issues of miscommunication and disinformation. it might even make it worse. But that's the direction I think things will go.

I just found this channel, i'm a mechatronical engineer and i've always looked at the word pretty much the way you described it in the vid, i was the whole video saying: "yes, exactly" "of course it is" you've earned a new sub

I was literally thinking about this today. Almost every paper bag ive used in my life has the Duro logo on it, and that made me think about how lucky it would have been to invent a product that cannot by improved at all, so that person has the entire market on paper bags.

I have a paperclip that was sent to me by Alicebooks. I bought a book of sheet music from Japan, and, seeing the address was in England, they translated the song titles, printed them out, and clipped them inside the front cover with a paperclip that (when clipped) looks like a quaver. It is my favourite paperclip, for sentimentality reasons as well as novelty. I also have so few uses for paperclips that one is plenty for me. Other designs are substandard.

John Travolta explaining product design to me, what a time to be alive