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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, @11:14PM (2 children)
I don't understand what you mean. It seems to me western economies now favor big businesses over smaller ones. Are you saying to end aging, explore more of space and get strong AI the businesses need to get even bigger?
Good point, although average human lifespan is already much longer than it was a few hundred years ago. Are we more forward thinking? We have vastly more technical knowledge, so it's hard to compare.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:35PM
Regulation creates strong economies of scale. Figuring out how to run a business to be compatible with a particular rule set is roughly constant cost, meaning it's a lot cheaper per unit of economic activity to cover the regulatory needs of a large business than it is a small business. Similarly, it's a lot easier for the big company to figure out how to bend the rules more effectively to stay in compliance while eking out larger profits.
Do you have to ask? How we handle risk is a great example. When people are almost all very poor and relatively short-lived, then people aren't very interested in safer working conditions or better environments. It's accepted that people will die in accidents and that pollution happens. But give people a long life and they care when that life is greatly shortened by a sloppy workplace or nasty pollution that could have easily been cleaned up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:28AM
In addition to my previous statements on regulation, consider this example. You want to build a new laser printer that's really good. Right away, you will run afoul of a variety of regulations in the US and elsewhere about building laser printers that a) leave identifying marks on the page, and b) detect when someone is trying to print any of a number of protected currencies (including the US dollar). So it's not enough to just build a better printer. Your printer also needs to pass various frivolous regulatory tests as well.