7 Reasons to No-Hire a Product Designer (Part I)

Imagine I walk into your house one sunny afternoon with a plate of cookies and a box of tea for our Sherlock marathon (hey, no judging.) You're not there to greet me at the door. Instead, I find you in the bathroom amidst a battlefield of tools—pipes and bolts and gears and instruments-I-don't-know-the-name-of-but-kinda-look-like-devices-of-torture. Your brows are furrowed in a deep V as you hunch over a gigantic, pipe-wrapped mass of brass and wood and porcelain sitting where your toilet used to be.

"Uh, whatcha doing?" I ask.

You frown. (Apparently, you expected more out of my powers of deduction after all that Sherlock-watching). "My toilet broke," you say, "So I bought a bunch of stuff at Home Depot to fix it." You wipe your hands on your jeans, step back, and crank a lever. There is a loud gurgling sound as the machine rumbles to life, then burps silent. "It works," you say with some satisfaction.

"Wow," I say. "It's…impressive."

And it is. It looks like an invention from the days of airships and steam engines, all polished metal and criss-crossing pipes and clicking, whrring gears. I'd never seen anything quite like it before. I point to a dial where a thin, red arrow trembles between a bunch of numbers. "What's that for?" I ask.

You say: (surprise! This blog post just turned interactive!)

A. "Isn't it the sickest? Bet you've never seen one of those dials before on a toilet. Nbd, though. It’s just a little thing called innovation."

B. "Ah, glad you asked. It's necessary to understand the hydraulic pressure locking mechanism I built. You see, the numbers here correspond to the joules needed for the proper functioning of the lumbar pipes…" <answer continues for another seven minutes as you pull some pencil diagrams out of your pocket, walk me through your alternative ideas, and eventually end with three pages of mathematical calculations for why this works>

C. "Oh, I was watching Youtube videos on how to fix a toilet and this one guy has a whole channel called Pimp my Loo and he always throws one of these suckers on."

D. "Hmm, good question. I can’t recall, but I’m sure it was important at the time..."