quick reminder that muji uses slave labor from xinjiang
Ah fuck
There’s no good company. Some are only a bit less worse.
In this case, Muji is a bit more worse
That’s bad
Another company to avoid
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Manufacturers: Best I can do is planned obsolescence.
This is the philosophy that they use when building spacecraft. Most sensors and instruments on the Voyager craft have been turned off to conserve power, but they continue to function enough to still communicate with Earth.
My printer needs some pointers on this. It breaks when yellow runs low.
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I know it was a joke, but you kinda do.
Losing an eye doesn’t end you. And losing a lung, you start to slow down. You’re still functional. And even have a chance to get treatment.
But also like the flashlight, if you hit critical parts like the circuitry, well…
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That is a great concept, mostly if the user is also notified that something is degraded so they can use it, but repair it when they have the opportunity.
This does not apply to this flashlight. Working on multiple battery types is not graceful degredation as batteries do not degrade into less batteries and a AA does not degrade into a AAA. Cell packs can become slightly unbalanced or by user error you can put 2 dead batteries with 2 good batteries, but then they will discharge into each other anyway and really cut the lifespan.
Pretty cool feature and handy if you run out of batteries during an emergency, but I don’t think it fits the definition lol
Cell packs can become slightly unbalanced or by user error you can put 2 dead batteries with 2 good batteries, but then they will discharge into each other anyway and really cut the lifespan
One interpretation could be that each battery powers a separate LED, and thus they aren’t connected and if a battery goes dead that LED just goes unpowered.
So aside from the mechanism, it also potentially means redundancy and higher cost (more parts). I’d say maybe the LEDs ran by AAA might last longer (same LED configured to run lower so the battery lasts longer), but LEDs themselves probably aren’t the thing burning out in most cases.
As a bonus it’d mean that it’d be easier to know when your batteries are low (especially if high-and-low placements meant batteries go dead one-by-one rather than all-at-once), a problem for me as I keep using my flashlight until it’s super dim (somewhat because it’s fine, somewhat because I don’t notice). Though I guess that could be an issue too, I know the battery charger I have charges batteries in pairs.
That last part said, it might be better to use the AAA batteries as backup (or maybe extra light in a high-power mode) instead.
I wouldn’t really call this graceful degradation, more “convenient/good design.” Since changing batteries is sort of a regular occurrence for a flashlight. But the sentiment is appreciated regardless.
This was posted in another community recently, so I’m copying my comment from that:
I learnt about graceful degradation in relation to escalators and how they compare to elevators/lifts. Basically escalators become stairs, whereas lifts become cages.
It’s been one of my favourite design concepts, alongside hidden design (design which improves things without being apparent/in your face about it)
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it’s unrelated to planned obsolescence as in it’s not about designing things to last, but for a design to be functional even if there’s some issue outside the control of the product design. You can get graceful degradation along with planned obsolescence, they’re not mutually exclusive.
Reminds me of the differences in design cultures in different companies, though I heard it in relation to countries but idk if that was a stereotype or not. What I heard was about differences in design philosophies towards a similar goal of a good product: one company over engineered their stuff to last a long time, whereas the other company relied on redundancy by putting in a second of anything that was likely to fail in parallel to the original.
I’m interested in any good examples of hidden design you can think of.
I’m assuming you listen to the podcast 99% invisible?
I don’t actually, I never really got into podcasts for some reason, exception is I do end up watching wvfrm but nothing else.
As for good examples of invisible design, there is nothing that I can think off the top of my head, I guess it’s just as invisible to me. Jokes aside, the only example coming to my head rn is not the best example, it’s of the slit in old macbooks for activity indication light (IIRC). It was so thin that it was literally invisible to the naked eye unless the light was shining, so it’s kind of playing up to the concept itself, in turn making it noticeable and not actually following the principle I mentioned.
After racking my brain quite a bit I did come up with an example: pinch to zoom, it’s very high level as an example but you would realise it’s intuitiveness if you have ever seen someone try to apply it to the real world. Invisible design is an issue because of this, because it’s supposed to get out of the way and so you just don’t notice in day to day life, it only becomes noticeable when it suddenly is not there.
Escalators vs elevators is maybe a good example of the concept in theory, but in practice escalators are the worse design of the two, and they don’t necessarily compete anyway.
Escalators are either slightly faster stairs or stairs for the sedentary. Their only practical advantage is clearing high-volume areas quickly, like transit stations. But otherwise, they are worse stairs - costly, narrow, power consuming mechanical stairs that require regular maintenance. Elevators are an accessibility feature. They allow easy movement of the handicapped and large cargo, and can move many, many floors quickly. Nobody is taking escalators to the 57th floor of a building.
Not to say escalators don’t have that advantage of failing in a useful way, just that they don’t do anything stairs don’t already do. Nothing else really does what elevators do.
Better example may be, say, ebikes or hybrid cars, provided they don’t lock up the conventional drive system in the event the electric portion fails.
Agreed, as I mentioned that’s the context in which I learnt of the concept, maybe because it’s the easiest to grasp for a layman, but it’s certainly not the best as you demonstrated. I still would probably use it to explain because it’s a known quantity, but I agree with your point.
In tabletop game design there’s a similar concept of “collapsing gracefully” - where an rpg is designed to preserve as much fun as possible when you forget the rules.
This is also a philosophy for building web apps - flexibility to still work if client features are unavailable rather than breaking or refusing to work at all. Someone having JavaScript turned off, for instance - some sites will show you no content with a “JavaScript is required” notice, while others are made to at least display the basic page.
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LIKE US.
I appreciate the thought but for a flashlight it seems like over-designing that will just result in an unnecessarily high price. If you put in all batteries at the same time they will all run out at the same time too, so this won’t be useful in practice.
So you don’t appreciate the thought
Gotta admit I enjoyed this comment way too much.
Kudos good sir/madam and I hope you have an amazing day
I appreciate that they care about being innovative, trying to solve problems that haven’t been solved before or just solving them in a better way. I appreciate that they don’t just lazily take the conservative approach and rehash what’s been done a thousand times before. In the end that’s necessary to move society forward. Their efforts just didn’t turn out well in this particular instance. I hope they do next time.
If your batteries voltage doesn’t match the voltage of your LED you need a voltage regulator anyway. All you need is to design it in such a way that it will always provide something close to the right voltage (at the expense of run time when fewer batteries are available).
IIRC the Logitech wireless mice work that way too. They can take one or two batteries. Use two for long life or only one if you prefer a lighter mouse.
I think the killer feature of that design is the ability to use two different sizes of battery and function no matter what is used. I’m not sure if I would personally ever put myself in a situation where I ran out of AA’s and only had AAA’s now that I bought myself a good supply of rechargeable ones, but I think that is a genuinely useful feature.
Obviously this flashlight was not designed for you. There are plenty of situations in which a flashlight is a critical piece of equipment.
It is very useful in practice when you have a dead flashlight during a storm and only a few batteries in the kitchen drawer.
But it would likely be cheaper to buy an extra set of backup batteries than to buy that flashlight.
Its usefulness is based on the unexpected, not the expected.
I used to push so hard for this when building websites, but was often forced (by clueless PMs mostly) to make sure it looked the exact same on every old busted ass browser that they or the clients grandma could load the damn thing on.
This was 9+ years ago mind, I’ve moved on and make shit you can hold and touch now. No more organizing electrons.
I hope the batteries are in parallel instead of in series because there’s a chance the batteries still with capacity might to to charge the dead ones.
Does anyone have a better example of this opposite of planned obsolescence idea haha
There are many examples in software engineering. You have probably encountered many of them online and didn’t even notice.
For example, a website that under load starts to serve cached content only. If more load is imposed it will stop serving ads and on yet more load it will render fewer articles per page, etc.
It’s one of those things that when you’re doing it right people will think you’re not doing anything at all.