I love my roommate's stitch ripper.
It's used to cut the seams in garnments for altering or reusing the fabric. There is some bright red plastic at one end that covers roughly half the object, giving the user an obvious visual clue (read "map") that is the end you hold while using it.
There is also a tiny ball of the same red plastic covering one of the two metal points that surround the cutting blade. This point is there as a constraint so that it doesn't damage the outside of the piece's material. Since the ball is also much easier to see than the tiny point of metal it is covering, it aids in the visibility of the user's progress in ripping apart a seam. It also lets the user know that when the red ball is in between the two fabric panels, he or she is just cutting the stitches and not into the fabric. The fact that the cutting edge is surrounded is another constraint that forces the user to cut the stitch at a perpendicular angle, this means that it's much harder to damage the surface you're working (because the pointy metal isn't facing down) or poke you in the lap if you're working on the couch.
The spaces in between the stitches of seams are very, very small, and if you're using a razor or exacto-knife it is easy to cut too far, or miss the stitch completely, thereby ruining your garnment. The small point that has been left in its bare metal state is a key part of the usefullness of the design. It affords the user the ability to gently and delicately pull the seam apart before cutting the next stitch.
I consider myself a smart shopper, and don't buy
many things I end up hating, but these ice cube trays I got at No Frills are terrible. I was having people over the next night, and didn't want to buy ice, and these things were 2 for a dollar.
There's not much you have to do to map out an ice cube tray properly, you just have to ensure that there is more concave surface area on one side than the other. The designers of this object succeeded in that respect. But it makes crappy ice.
How can ice be crappy? Ice is ice, right? Well, I beg to differ. Ice is placed in beverages to make them colder, not to water them down (otherwise I'd be adding water to my scotch), which is the exact opposite of what the ice made from this particular tray does. The long, thin, shard-like "cubes" of ice melt at a fraction of the time of your standard ice from the tray that comes with the freezer. They stick out the top of shorter glasses. The partitions in between the individual ice compartments are too low, and this lack of designed constraint means that you can overfill the tray without overflowing it. When the tray is too full, the ice comes out as a ne big bumpy block, and the shallowness of the individual slots makes it impossible to break the frozen together pieces apart when it's done.
The "affordance" of making ice in less time (by making the shallower moulds) is overshadowed by the how cumbersome it is to carry the tray from sink to freezer without spilling any water. Every little spill can actually make you lose a significant portion of the future ice, because the tray holds much less water than your conventional ice cube tray thing. I now use these trays to mix paint for school projects. It does a pretty good job of doing that.
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