Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 31 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the darwin-award-candidates dept.

Teenagers Are Still Eating Tide Pods, But Don't Expect A Product Redesign

If you've never seen it, a Tide Pod looks like a little rounded packet, white with two separate swirls of blue and orange liquid. To be clear, a Tide Pod is laundry detergent heavily concentrated into a single packet, meant to dissolve in water and clean a single load of laundry. But these days, it's a dare — an Internet meme, in which teenagers try to eat Tide Pods as a "challenge." The trend picked up in December, but the pace of poisonings is still getting worse. So far in January alone, poison control centers have received 134 reports of "intentional exposures" to laundry packets, Tide or others. That's compared with 53 cases the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported for all of 2017, mostly involving teenagers.

[...] Designs like this are never willy-nilly, says Chris Livaudais, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The process starts by studying the habits of a potential user to find ways to make their life better in some way. In this case, the condensed formula does away with a heavy jug and the need for measurement.

[...] The colors are already associated with liquid detergent, Livaudais says. And the swirls "might imply how active the ingredients are and how well it would do the washing job."

Jones says the swirls were indeed a design choice — indicating that the pod brings together three ingredients (cleaning, stain-fighting and brightening, he says). The pod is transparent because customers have told Tide they like to know what they're putting into the wash with their clothes.

Livaudais says industrial designers spend a lot of time mulling best and worst case scenarios for the use of products. But if someone knowingly chooses to misuse them? "That's completely out of our hands," he says.

National Poison Help hotline: 1-800-222-1222.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:05PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:05PM (#631101) Journal

    The problem is, people wouldn't buy as many. Looking like attractive food makes something attractive, even if you know it isn't food.

    And the teen age years are also the time when many people experiment with not trusting conventional wisdom, in politics as well as in other things...like what's safe to eat. This seems an essential part of human success. If it weren't for the teenagers we'd probably just be an omnivorous ape.

    Seriously, children are brought up in the tribal wisdom by their parents, and when then become teenagers they start questioning it. This continues with decreasing strength until the late 20's. At that point people tend to become set in their ways. Grandparents are the repository of the collected tribal wisdom. Probably the real solution would be the have local grandparents who would be accepted by teens as "probably trustworthy" even when they reject their parents as "overly controlling". But this requires an extended family to live locally. (This prediction allows a modicum of testing...if anyone wants to bother. There do still exist a few such families. The prediction here is that the teenagers in those families will be significantly less likely to do something "bloody stupid".)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:33PM (1 child)

    by theluggage (1797) on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:33PM (#631484)

    The problem is, people wouldn't buy as many.

    When people buy a pack of detergent they may be swayed by the brightly coloured box and all its marketing claims, but they don't generally look inside and see if they like the colour of the actual detergent. Nobody seems to care that (unlike the commercials) there's no explosion of cartoon flowers, no swirly hyperspace vortex thingy in their washing machine and no amiable foam monster appears in the suds (unless they're teenagers who've eaten other inadvisable substances).

    Seriously, children are brought up in the tribal wisdom by their parents, and when then become teenagers they start questioning it.

    Yeah, but the conventional wisdom that today's teenagers are questioning isn't the stuffy old wrong conventional wisdom of our parents that we rightly rejected when we were teenagers - its our conventional wisdom. :-)

    OK, I say that as a joke, but it really is a fallacy to assume that "conventional wisdom" must be wrong because other "conventional wisdom" has been wrong in the past...

    Also, how did we adults ever survive having teenage access to (e.g.) chemistry sets with actual toxic chemicals in (ans: some idiots probably did make themselves a copper sulphate and potassium permanganate soda, but they had to think of it themselves rather than copy some moron on YouTube).

    Pretty sure I only nearly killed myself once... and I'll never now forget that graphite conducts electricity and that therefore pencils are inadequate insulation pushing an interesting sort of variable gear thing inside a 240V motor with questionable electrical saftey - and that was just a "D'oh!" brainfart moment that I knew was stupid, and why, as soon as I got the shock. Today's teenagers would probably stick their finger directly on the live terminal if someone on Facebook told them it would give them an orgasm.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:38PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:38PM (#631574) Journal

      When people buy a pack of detergent they may be swayed by the brightly coloured box and all its marketing claims, but they don't generally look inside and see if they like the colour of the actual detergent. Nobody seems to care that (unlike the commercials) there's no explosion of cartoon flowers, no swirly hyperspace vortex thingy in their washing machine and no amiable foam monster appears in the suds (unless they're teenagers who've eaten other inadvisable substances).

      The decision to buy isn't just made at the point of purchase, but it's continually reinforced, or not, during the use of the product. So if the product doesn't look as "attractive", then it's less likely to be bought in the future. This isn't rational thinking, because it's not even though about. It's just patterns of behavior and memories being reinforced.

      OK, I say that as a joke, but it really is a fallacy to assume that "conventional wisdom" must be wrong because other "conventional wisdom" has been wrong in the past...

      That's not what I asserted. I said "teenagers challenge conventional wisdom". They don't have enough experience to know which conventional wisdom is correct, so they pick a "random" assortment, guided by their peers. And different groups of teenagers will have different groups of peers with different things that they are challenging. Some of the groups will pick really unwise things to challenge, but they don't know which is which.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.