Aren’t they pretty? Perhaps, but each one is a terrible design by a renowned designer. The first is Michael Graves’ woeful garlic press for Target. It’s cast metal - too brittle for the pressure exerted on the thin neck of the handles. I broke one myself.
Next is Ross Lovegrove’s pot for Hackman - a cookware company that should know better. The melamine framing the glass lid can’t take the expansion and contraction from heating. It cracks pretty quickly. The handles are also the perfect shape to funnel steam right onto your hands. Lovegrove’s design failures deserve an entry of their own.
Stemware should be designed to preserve the bouquet of its contents, but it would be nice not to need to tilt it so high to drink from. Are Karim Rashid’s pieces for Mikasa some kind of joke? His “Kimono” flatware (not pictured) was also an unbalanced oddity with handles folded like ribbon and doubling the weight.
The problem with these designers is that they’re really just stylists (even with their respective educations). This is no disrespect to stylists. The best know how to collaborate with engineers so that little things like product safety aren’t ignored.
This is a rewritten entry from a retired blog of mine. It seems so relevant now that I decided to re-post it.