How to Design a Vernacular Chair | Hacker News Reader

How to Design a Vernacular Chair

christopherschwarz.substack.com

34 pointssamclemens7 comments

There are many instances where choosing functional over pretty can be beneficial, and the author illuminates one of the most important instances, which is when trying to be pretty allows the introduction of flaws.

This, I think, is a bigger problem than we realize. How many things have obsolescence baked in due to decisions based on how the thing looks? How much better might they be if that energy and material were put in to functionality rather than appearance?

I don't remember details, but there was a story recently about a car's plastic lenses that cost thousands of dollars to replace.

I wonder what a car redrawn by the author of this piece might look like. Perhaps it'd look like a car from simpler times, one which confuses nobody and one which would be easy to repair. It's too bad that only exists in the past.

Isn't cost of repair relative? Why should looks have to suffer because repair is beyond the reach of some percent of the population but not others?

If you had better tools/skills to repair more items wouldn't that lower the cost of the repair? In your example, could the plastic lens be repaired by a toolkit that can sand it down and refinish the plastic thereby avoiding complete replacement?

New cars have LED tail lights. Once failure occurs, the common procedure to repair is to replace the entire module. However if you had skills to do a low level debug of the board, you could isolate the failed component (passives like resistors/capacitors/led modules or ICs) and just replace that one component repeairing the module for a much cheaper price.

I've been thinking about this recently. I do vintage PC restoration as an on and off hobby and recently I had a PC case with a front cover made of transparent acrylic with scratches. It also has text painted on the plastic. After failing to restore the piece using various polishes, I've considered either taping off the painted text and using a sanding + a buffing machine or just sanding/buffing it down completely and setting up a screen printing system to recreate the logos/text. Its a 20$ Pentium 4 Shuttle PC so its not worth the time and effort but the skills gained would unlock the ability to do better repairs on more expensive machines.

With enough skillset it appears that you can have your looks and your repairability at the same time.

Form does follow function, at least at first. Skeuomorphism only happens because the original had design compromises that looked cool.

I think we humans will happily sacrifice aesthetics if it improves something we care about. Unfortunately, we don't care enough about baked-in obsolescence (or can't measure it).

I do wish we would look at electric cars again, to see if making them not look like cars would improve them.

Am I still Hellbanned?

Apparently yes. I vouched for this comment to be able to reply to it.

What's hellbanned? I can reply just fine without upvoting first.

GP was banned years and years ago for something (I don't know what) and now their comments are all [dead] on arrival. People (sibling commenter to you did this) can vouch for these [dead] comments ([banned] cannot be vouched, IIRC, but is very rare). Also upvoting and vouching are separate things here. You vouch [dead] or [flagged][dead] comments, you can only upvote live comments. You never need to upvote before replying to a comment.

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