26 Baffling Design Choices Found in the Wild (July 28, 2024)

JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor

Jul 28, 2024 9:00 AM EDT

Design is all around us, from the socks we put on our feet to the cars we drive to work to the pencils we use to write our to-do lists. Hundreds of thousands of micro-decisions had to go into every one of these. Someone had to decide how long the pencil should be, how thick, how many ridges, what color it was, or how thick the graphite should be. And someone had to have the idea for a pencil in the first place. (On a side note, I wonder how that came about. Surely we were using our hands to inscribe things thousands of years ago, and it's amazing that we still do).

But we forget how much effort and time goes into everything we see and use. So no wonder it goes wrong sometimes. No wonder that designs ultimately fail sometimes. Good thing we're here to laugh about them.