Designer's lament
My wife and I
went out looking to replace our well used 20 year old dishwasher today, and what I saw appalled me. Has all sense gone out the window? Does no one who designs trays for example know what dishes look like? The racks were designed for saucers, not dinner plates.
Oh I suppose they would work for soup bowels, and most of the cutlery baskets were pretty good as well, but the main task that a dishwasher has is dishes isn’t it?
We saw a good deal on a machine that seems ok, however when we looked at the reviews, the comments included, no pot scrubber cycle, and the dish washing cycle barely cleans dishes, leaving residue even with the dishes pre-rinsed. The layout of the tray was such that loading the dishes was difficult, and the system suffered from poor reliability.
In contrast the dishwasher that has seen its last dishes, worked well for 20 years, had a tray that would accommodate a wide range of dishes bowels and cutlery, glasses and cups. Unfortunately, there are no parts available for this model any more, except for special order. To repair this machine is more than a new one, by a lot.
Sigh, well I guess we just have to keep looking, I am sure that somewhere out there is the machine that we are looking for, with design features that I can look at and not say to myself, I could do way better than that. Typically, I like to buy things that have a design that makes me say, boy, I wish I had designed that.
But that is just the grumblings of an old designer that is passionate about design. Often my grumblings are accompanied by my family rushing to leave the room that I am in.