The Inventor’s Curse

Inventors and designers are burdened with a curse. They can see a better way.  This may sound like a blessing.  But it makes it hard to just accept things as they are knowing that it could have been so much easier all along.

For example, any of us might accidentally insert a card with a magnetic strip backwards into an ATM or a hotel door.  A regular person would flip it around and go about their day without giving it another thought.  But product designers are tormented by the experience, unable to let it go. What just went wrong there? Was it user error? Or was it the machine’s fault?

Then they ask the next question: where exactly did the machine go astray? What is it about the design that lead the user to the error?  Perhaps it made unreasonable demands of our puny, preoccupied human minds.  Perhaps it did it on purpose, to teach a lesson — the machine wanted the human to fail in order to learn the machine’s rules. Or, perhaps it’s as simple as the people who created the machine simply not have a clear grasp of the problem at hand, and how humans tend to think and act.  Maybe it’s just sloppy design.

Next question. Did it have to be that way?  Is this really as good as it could be?

Most of the time the answer is no, and poof, then and there a better solution materializes. Maybe the card slot should have four magstrip readers within its housing so the user can insert the card in any way, without having to look or think or make sense of a diagram. (There are other solutions.)

With clear solutions so easy to come by, we make the wrongful assumption that it’s only a matter of time before someone in a position to do something about it fixes the problem once and for all.  The torment would soon be a think of the past.  But it doesn’t happen.  Years, even decades pass without any improvement.  And every single time we use the faulty product, we fret more than a normal person in the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Steal This Idea

StealThisIdea is a catharsis of such experiences, collected over the years, in the form of solutions to long-running problems

Philosophically, StealThisIdea is the anti-patent. The patent mindset says that ideas are precious, scarce possessions to be jealously hoarded. The StealThisIdea philosophy is that good ideas are not scarce, but a natural product of the type of inquiry described above. We believe it’s better to put unused ideas out in the wild where they might benefit companies and customers, than to keep them locked up.

We believe that stealing good designs is good. (What’s even better is picking apart a good design and putting together an even better one.)

So, if you happen to have influence over any of the products these ideas apply to, please pilfer at will, extend and improve what you find here. Acknowledgment is appreciated but not necessary. If you know someone who is involved in these products, send them a link.

About Philip Haine

StealThisIdea is written by me, D. Philip Haine, principal of Product Vision Associates in San Francisco.  Product Vision Associates is a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  (Read Philip Haine bio.)

If your team needs help coming up with the next breakthrough product idea, please drop me a line.

To follow Philip on Twitter click here.