My description could have been better. If you buy a toothpaste tube, the first time you use it you have to remove a seal. American tubes usually have a bit of paper or plastic that you have to pull. In Europan tubes you punch a hole. The top of the tube is usually designed to guide you and you pretty much don’t need any motor skills at all. There is usually a punch in the cap of the tube. If it is a screw cap it’s on the outside of the cap, if it’s a flip cap it’s usually on the inside of the cap and the cap is somewhat flexible so that if you press it, it will punch a hole. The American tubes are more instinctive to use (peeling is something we have done since before we became human, punching is something we started to do as we become human) and even an idiot without experience can figure out how to open them, but they are really hard to use for most people (even healthy normal elderly need both reading glasses and a plier). European tubes isn’t as intuitive to understand the first time, even though kids don’t seem to have any problem, but they are incredibly easy to use. Unfortunately, US is a big market and the ratio of easy to use tubes are decreasing even in markets where they used to dominate.

As for why the phone company issued them instead of another method? Probably has something to do with the phone company already having those ready and available for use in promotions, thus saving them lots of money on making an all-new one that probably makes the difference between a profit and a loss on that particular free giveaway.

Basically, some of his examples were funny, but for the most part, he’s a complete idiot and expects everything to cater to complete idiots.

I’d also venture it’s good to have it on in case a kid eats some of Rex’s ‘Candy’.

/have a cat that’s on people meds
//he rarely operates heavy machinery
///fark slashies on BB crosses the streams

Sign with sharp edges:
Photoshop contest.
(In case you can’t read it: the fine print at the bottom says: “Also, bridge is out ahead”.)

Odd signage:
Some are most likely for military or police forces, and not for public consumption.

Blood Stop:
In an emergency, you DON’T want something with a label like “Plasmagene” or (forgive me) “Clotilda”. (Is the former a TV Screen cleaner? The latter, a brand name for Devonshire Cream?)
You want something clear and utilitarian.

The man has no imagination.

http://www.hackgreen.co.uk/Hack_Green_History/hack_green_history.htm

The sign is broken if by “broken” you mean amusing, eye-catching and the generator of more publicity than the place would ever otherwise have received.

The sticker has the dosage instructions on it, printed onto a label which already carries the warnings. It’s still not much use to the dog, but the owner might want to know how often to give it the pills, and it’d be crazy for the pharmacist to have to choose from an array of different labels bearing different warning information whenever they needed to print instructions.

I love his basic premise, and he makes some great points, but I think some of the weaker examples dilute it.

But more important, I got to thinking about his categorizations of the various kinds of ways things are broken:
- Not my job
- Selfish jerks
- The world changed
- I didn’t know
- I’m not a fish [i.e. "what I made fails to work for those I didn't make it for"]
- Contradictions
- Broken on purpose

In theory, the way something would be “not broken” would be if none of those categories were true (i.e. “not (or+or+or…)” = “and not and not and not…”)

The trouble is the inverse list is a mishmash of idealism and absurdism: Consider, “nothing would be broken if (1) makers take responsibility for their actions, (2) makers are selfless to the cause of users, (3) the world never changes, (4) makers are knowledgeable about everything, (5) makers consider all possible users, (6) makers ensure their product is self-consistent and consistent with any environment, and (7) makers work exclusive for the benefit of the users.”

Pick and choose as you like, but I think the lecture would have made a lot more sense if Godin categorized “things that should never have been broken”, “things that might be fixable”, and “crap we’ll just have to live with”.

But then again, reading some of his blog, that’s not what Seth Godin’s all about. He seems to be a “shoot first” kind of guy; a prolific producer of brief statements and observations — sort of a fortune cookie blogger. And there are people out there who go back and find that what they are working on was mentioned by Godin some years ago, leading them to believe he has an uncanny prophetic ability.

Though I have to say I have been using that internet terminal at Montreal airport last year and it really sucks ass.

It appears as if he skimmed through Norman, Tufte and some others and then started his spiel. Not getting the point of the map Tufte quoted just illustrates his failing – he repeatedly doesn’t get the point of some of the examples he criticizes. Like the battery. Not only that he apparently didn’t get that there are good reason to keep it as it is, he misses that his solution wouldn’t be a solution – because it’s still possible to put them in in the wrong way. That’s the real problem, not having to alternate them when they are side-by-side.

The Swedish sign: Lame. I wonder when he’ll start complaining that foreigners have the name of speaking something other than English.

What really irks me, though, is that he’s just whining – and doesn’t seem to offer any solution. *Fixing* something is obviously not his job.

On a side note: Where’s the part about the tubes. I can’t find them.

And may I add that anglo-style light switches are inherently broken? Much too small. :)

The debit cards from his phone company could be a good example if the phone company got to keep any money that wasn’t spent due to the difficulty of spending it… and it might make for an interesting class-action lawsuit if that’s the case…

There’s certainly a lot to say about his last category of intentionally broken things — planned obsolescence, corporate bloatware, etc, etc…

Or perhaps the less we understand about how the things we buy actually work, the more likely we are to pay for shoddy things, “broken” things, or outright scams…

There’s lots of directions he could have taken this idea. I guess I was expecting more than out-of-context one-liner internet memes and a guy with the intellectual rigor of Andy Rooney basically saying “Bah! I don’t like certain things!”

A friend of mine once came over to my house when I was listening to a Charlie Parker record. After hearing a few songs he asked me “How can you listen to that shit? Every song sounds exactly the same.” So, Charlie Parker is broken. A few days later he came over when I had a Joe Henderson album on. “Listening to that shit again, are you? How can you do that, it all sounds the same,” he said.

Apparently jazz is broken, along with rare steak, hoppy beer, and a few sexual practices I won’t go into detail about, here. OTOH- Nouveau Beaujolais is truly broken and you would have to be an idiot or a Frenchman to disagree (the French know it’s undrinkable, actually, but they drink it anyway, because they are French, and also because they like to make fun of tourists.)

What Godin fails to point out is that borkedness is inevitable whenever everyone has to use the same stuff- one man’s borked is another man’s perfect. Of course some facilities are really better held in common, and used in common, and that imposes some hard limits on how much they can be deborked.

But as a general rule there will be less perceived borkedness in the world if my buddy is allowed to drive around in his CRX listening to Dire Straits first album eating overcooked meat and running over vegans, and I am left to sit in my La-Z-Boy recliner eating beautifully sauced offal and listening to Clifford Brown with fava beans and a nice chianti.

Vive la difference. Vive la market. Vive la sheep’s brains.

1/3 things that are broken
1/3 things that are funny
1/3 things that Seth doesn’t understand the wider context that makes the situation not broken

It’s fun and all. But not that eye-opening of an experience.

Big round sign: Traffic by vehicular not allowed…
Small square sign:
… during workday between 11:00 to 6:00
… during Saturday or other day before red letter day between 11:00 to 6:00
… during Sunday or other red letter day between 11:00 to 6:00

All times in 24-hour format.

This sign is not broken because everybody who needs to know what the sign means will be able to read it. The design makes it space efficient, simple and cheap to produce or alter and easy to read at a glance. The only thing that is slightly “broken” is that you are supposed to know what days are red letter days (days like Christmas Day, New Years Day et.c.), but if you are a foreigner in Sweden you can always look in a Swedish calender (red letter days are … red).

Stupid analogy

It’s like when Americans complain about European tube containers. The Americans have tubes that are impossible to open by anyone with the slightest dysfunction in their hands and are complicated and expensive to produce. The Europeans (most countries) have tubes that can be open by anyone with 2×2 digits (or toes if you don’t have hands, or with just one hand/feet with the help of a simple tool) and are cheap and efficient to produce. Yet Americans always complain about European tubes, simply because they are to dumb to figure out what to do with them and to dumb to ask anybody for advice. Yes, it’s something you may have to learn from somebody else (usually at age 2, but kids that age usually figure out how by themself), but once you learned the skill (at most 20 seconds, even if you are really, really stupid) they are a lot simpler to use then the “simple” solution. The only good reason to use American style tubes is to prevent kids below the age of two from being able to open them; but most people above the age when the fingers start to get crooked or weak, need help from their five-year-old grandchildren to open American-style tubes.

Graphs are an efficient way to communicate and illustrate sometimes extremely vast amounts of sometimes very complicated information. They’re not just a dumb-it-down-for-me conference tool. If all the information in that graph he doesn’t like were presented as equations and raw data, it could be pages and pages long, but of course since the graph cannot be easily and quickly understood out of context by a layman, it must be broken.

His idea seems to be that if he, Seth Godin, cannot suss out something’s meaning and purpose within ten seconds of seeing a picture of it on his computer, then it must be “broken.” The problem is always with the person who did/made/designed a thing – taking a moment to understand it is not Seth Godin’s job.

-mikep

I used to work retail, and there were tons of people who wanted to pay for a single purchase using multiple methods of payment. (i.e. put $40 on a card, $14 on cash or similar.) That’s not “broken” that’s “flexibility.”

I do agree with him about cab lines, those are retarded.