Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Decapitated Panda -- Good Product Design?

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but haven't had the chance. And tonight I do. A light-hearted romp into my life if you will. For a long time, I was running all my schoolwork (design heavy stuff) on a 128 MB USB. Seriously, I know. Then I found out how small that was and how cheap biggers ones are that I upgraded to a Tribeca 1GB. And I couldn't resist buying the super cute panda! (It was much cleaner with paint fully intact when I bought it.)


And I took it home and unwrapped it from it's indestructible plastic casing, and I pulled its head off. --Wait, what?! Seriously. Tribeca, or whoever, designed the USB so that in order to use it, you had to pull off the panda head to reveal the USB port.


And now my adorable little panda is a decapitated piece of metal--gasp--robot Panda! (That joke would make more sense if you could see the body/USB part of it. Oops, didn't upload that photo. But robot panda was a great joke for it.) The whole point of this blog is just to say--wouldn't it have made more sense to make the feet the part that comes off? Because then you'd plug in the panda USB and a happy panda face would be looking back at you, instead of just a panda body. Strange indeed.

Side Note PRO: I really do like how the little light between its feet glows red. That's pretty cute.
Side Note CON: The panda body is a little chubby, because you know, pandas are and this is obviously a close to real life replica. But this extra pudge means the panda USB won't fit into the USB ports on the side of the MAC keyboards and that is sad.