One Good Turn

Hold on a second

I love industrial design. Sculptors create shapes whose meanings might be abstract or social. In contrast, packaging designers create shapes whose meanings are functional. A great design is not only elegant to behold, but is also useful, and its very shape reveals its usage.

Packaging designers are some of the cleverest people around. They often package products intended for use in the kitchen or bathroom, where we often have wet hands. Why then do they often create smooth tops that cannot be opened with wet hands?

A smooth lid makes for a great product photo. But if you can’t open the darn thing because there’s no friction, that’s bad everyday design¹.

Here are some real containers. Their lids are all smooth, hard, shiny plastic. Imagine trying to open one with wet hands.

For dry hands only

This post was inspired by this salt grinder for cooks, which naturally lives in the kitchen. I bought this, seduced by the romance of grinding salt just when I needed it.

My smooth surfaces shall defeat you

A few weeks ago I was making baked potatoes. My hands still had just a bit of olive oil on them when I picked this up and tried to turn the grinder. My hands slid easily with nothing to offer resistance. Ultimately, I couldn’t grind a single grain of salt.

The shame is that there are so many attractive ways to make things easy to turn for hands both wet and dry. Like ridges:

Mmm, ridges

A couple of ridges on my salt grinder would have turned frustration to pleasure.

Thinking about this, I realized that sometimes you only need a single ridge. Placed horizontally, it can give you the grip you need to open a hinged top.

A smidge of a ridge for a hinge

Here’s a lovely variation on the theme, this time on a shampoo bottle, where the designer knew that you’d almost surely be opening the bottle with wet hands. The blue dot is a shallow bowl that your thumb fits into perfectly to pop open the lid.

Wet hands? No problem.

Smart, elegant, aesthetic, and functional. It can be done!

My vote for Best In Show goes to a beautifully minimal solution: squeeze to open. I’m not referring to over-the-counter drugs that open by squeezing the cap and then turning. Here I mean opening a container with a hinged lid simply by squeezing the flexible container itself, causing the lid to pop open. In this example, the sweet spots for squeezing are embossed on the lid, but you can hold this properly just by gripping the container 90 degrees from the little tab that’s part of the hinge.

Squeeze me, baby

This is so perfect. It requires just the right material, and content that won’t come shooting out from the squeezing pressure (a few candies, for instance). I don’t think you could do this for a large bottle. But for something this sized, it’s lovely.

A visually pleasing form that is also perfectly functional for its intended use is my favorite kind of industrial design. I am always delighted at clever and thoughtful designs for things we use every day.

1. Don Norman, *The Design of Everyday Things*, Basic Books, 2013