Why Is it So Hard to Design a Good Can Opener?

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The Bean Dad can opener saga is also a design story. DianaBudds reports

Photo: annick vanderschelden/Getty Images The first viral Twitter controversy of 2021 came courtesy of a can of baked beans, a hungry 9-year-old who didn’t know how to use a classic Swing-a-Way can opener, and a dad intent on teaching an lesson about problem-solving. “This little device was designed to do one thing: open cans,” wrote John Roderick in his Twitter thread. “Study the parts, study the can, figure out what the can-opener inventor was thinking when they tried to solve this problem.

Why are can openers still so bad? “When you have trouble with things — whether it’s figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industry — it’s not your fault,” wrote the design guru Don Norman in his 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things. “Don’t blame yourself: Blame the designer. It’s the fault of the technology, or, more precisely, of the design.

Since the initial Good Grips collection, OXO has added more manual can openers to its repertoire, but the difficulty with reengineering mechanisms remains. “The challenge of making a good can opener is that it requires many high precision components to be assembled to a rigid structure and sold at an affordable price,” says Mack Mor, a senior product engineer at OXO.

 

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DianaBudds The can opener is the wrong way round...

DianaBudds It's not though. Nine-year-olds shouldn't be given cans of beans to eat. They should be fed balanced meals by their parents/caregivers.

DianaBudds It isn't. His daughter was just a dummy

DianaBudds Literally just go to ikea

DianaBudds also - pls think of left handed people.... its tricky!!!!

DianaBudds

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