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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.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
Ah but is that the cause or the symptom? The bigger the debt and the profit projections, the more hard working tax payers need to be spawned to make up for it.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:41PM
last time there were too many people, they killed a lot off in a war.
the baby boomers were a result of the people that came home, and the golden age of things because a lot of people were culled and did not consume resources.
true, good and bad died, but the takeaway is that you dont have growth limits if you aren't facing resource restrictions from too much growth.
most wars are related to people and growth. emotions cause problems. the stock market works similarly... there are plenty of good stocks that are not endlessly growing, but you have to dig to find them because its the easy gains from continued growth that people look for.
anyway before the tide pods, they added blue crystals to unlock enzyme power or something. cleaned mostly the same.
buying loose power in a box is the most economical way to do it, but even my dishwasher manual says it cleans best with cascade platinum pods. and that the loose powder is for poor losers and when your friends show up and see you are violating the social contract by not using the most expensive product, no woman will sleep with me and my children will refuse to pay for my retirement.