"You know what really grinds my gears?"

I'll tell you what really grinds my gears, bad consumer product design, that's what!

At risk of being sued by Peter Griffin for nicking his tag line, I thought I would share some of my grievances I have with some of the many consumer products I have owned, used or looked at and walked away from in disgust.

Now fast approaching the big four ohhh as I am, when I can become an official G.O.M. (Grumpy Old Man) I finally get to air my views and pent up rage all of these years for bad design.

Case in point, today I was feeding our five month old baby with his Phillips Avent baby feeding bottle. Now the little chap is a tad independent and grasps for the bottle, he appears even at this early stage to be ambidextrous (it kinda runs in the family) and he reaches out enthusiastically for the bottle (quite a good design might I say). To to aid our little fellow in gaining a good grip we decided to purchase a little add on extra, a pair of handles that fit rather neatly under the cap, clamping the said device to the bottle so baby can have a little go at feeding himself.

Well no actually, you see, who ever it was that designed the handle didn't really care about baby ergonomics did they.. no, perhaps they were thinking that babies didn't really need them and designed them to be used by a 95th percentile adult, or maybe they were smoking pot and just didn't give a toot, whatever the reason I don't know.

You see the baby bottle has to be tilted to allow the milk to flow down towards the teat, easy if your a grown up, but these little nippers just can't raise the elbow and articulate their tiny little wrists to hold the bottle at a suitable orientation as the handles are parallel to the axis of the cylindrical body.

Now a simple remedy would have been to actually study how a baby might hold the bottle and such an exercise would immediately have alerted the industrial designer to affect a pair of handles substantially perpendicular to this bottle axis. in fact looking at the design the handles could have been better shaped, would have taken a nice soft TPE over moulding for baby to grip and would have required a tool no more complex.

And that's just for starters, I could go on and on and on, and if you know me at all, you'll know I probably will.