The pervading "shoebox" homes in the UK represent the very pinnacle of bad design IMO. A fancy gadget that's slightly annoying to use may leave you slightly miffed, but a badly designed home (I.E. too small!!!) can seriously affect quality of life.
I beg to differ! Concorde like TSR2 before it and The Brabazon before that are examples of good design shot in the foot by politcs and bean counters. The Comet, in hindsight had some obvious problems but then hindsight is a great thing is'nt it?
Car and property alarms. Why can't they be designed to cut out after 10 or 15 minutes instead of sounding for eternity unless someone switches them off?
I have to mention the keyboards on some of the new HP laptops, the hotkeys on the left are terrible, when I\'m trying to Ctrl+C or something similar I end up opening the calculator, it\'s the worst keyboard design I\'ve seen on a laptop so far :|
I'm probably being unreasonably harsh here, but.. a) carpet sweepers (silly) b) Vacuum haircut machines (even sillier): We probably should have a "what's the silliest piece of design ever done?" thread.
Why is it that the paper used for many greetings cards don't absorb ink properly? I've filled out many cards with a horrible ball-point because my fountain pen would smudge. Not really mechanical design, but an example of bad material selection.
This site has been around for a long time but seems to be fitting here... http://baddesigns.com/examples.html
