Well, it has been a while since my last post, but here I am again.
What has my goat this time? Hooks, cord hangers, places to wrap cord and retainer designs that just don’t work.
Now I am not sure that this is an actual design issue, but instinct tells me that some of it must be. On the other hand, some of this is poor execution of the design, when somewhere down the manufacturing process, someone gets the bright idea that the power cord needs to be longer that the original design called for.
What am I going on about? You have all experienced it at one time or another, that pesky power cord on an appliance or device that just doesn’tfit where it is supposed to fit. See the hose on the illustration below, I have circled in red, the cord is overflowing the hook capacity. Just a little hostling, and it becomes partially unwound and tangled. Not nice. If you look at the top hook, the cord is piled higher than the hook. Also just waiting for the right situation to really annoy and frustrate the owner.
So… how does this happen. I can only guess, but here are a couple of likely scenarios.
Senario one, the designer designs the cord hooks without knowing what the cord will look like, but is assured that that will be considered in a later phase, but that consideration never happens and in production an existing cord is just slapped into the design.
Senario two. The designer does the whole design including the cord, and then marketing decides that it will never sell unless the cord is 3 feet longer.
Senario three. The production team decided that the hooks are too large for Packagin (tooling, handling, etc) and reduces the size of them.
Senario four. The accuonting department looks for cost saving in the product, and elimitates the hooks as being not cost effective.
A pox upon all people who don’t know a think about design but make changes because it seemed like a good idea at the time at the cost of the user who must deal with this problem every time they use the product!