There are many reasons I love July and the Tour de France is definitely one of them. I’ve been a cyclist most of my life and although I run more than I ride these days, cycling remains near and dear to my heart. Cycling is beautiful for many reasons. As children, cycling expands our world by gifting us the freedom to explore beyond our immediate yard or neighborhood block. As adults, cycling is a fantastic sport for fitness, adventure, and touring. It may also be daily transportation, providing fitness benefits alongside the practical role of serving as transportation. The freedom cycling provides is powerful. It’s possible to cover great distances under your own physical effort. At the end of a ride, whether it’s 10 miles, 25 miles, a metric century (62 miles) or a full century (100 miles), a cyclist feels like s/he has been somewhere and accomplished something. And, during an effort like this there is always a Zen that is achieved, akin to a “runner’s high” where the cyclist and the bike are one. There is no thinking, there is only the harmony of movement and it is glorious.

The Tour de France shows us what is possible when elite riders saddle up. This year, the peloton will cover 3,333 kilometers, approximately 2,071 miles, over 21 stages and 23 days, including two rest days. [1] They will do this at race pace while climbing mountains. It’s an incredible feat of human achievement. Cycling isn’t just for elite racers, however. In 2024, a record 112 million Americans rode a bike at least once, the highest participation rate since PeopleForBikes began tracking in 2014. [2] Women make up about 25% of all cyclists in the US, compared to 49% in Germany and 55% in the Netherlands. Women’s cycling participation has increased by 53% since 2013, with growth outpacing men in commuting. [3]

Multi-day tours, Gran Fondos and other organized rides for competitive and recreational riders continue to grow in popularity. RAGBRAI, the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, is the oldest, largest, and longest recreational multi-day bicycle touring event in the world. It is a non-competitive ride traversing Iowa’s full width from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River, held annually the last full week of July. RAGBRAI began in 1973 and through 2024, 474,103 riders have participated over the years. [4] It’s lauded as a great event drawing participants of all ages and is often referred to as a “rolling party.” All of this is to say that cycling is an accessible sport/activity for men, women and children of all ages.

Cycling is also synonymous with design and innovation. Every component on a modern road bike has been iterated toward perfection. Carbon fiber frames engineered to flex in exactly the right directions, electronic drivetrains that shift with the press of a button, wheels so aerodynamically refined they are wind-tunnel tested before they go to market. The bicycle, across 150 years, has been one of the great proving grounds of materials science and industrial design. And then there is the saddle: three components, leather, rails, and rivets. Unchanged in its essential logic since 1882, still the component that determines whether you finish the ride and whether you will fall in love with the sport. To be clear, there are very few products with which we have such an intimate relationship as the bike saddle.

Exhibit A: The Brooks B17

I ride a full carbon fiber bike, with carbon wheels and SRAM Red components. The bike is set up to my exact ergonomics and anthropometric measurements. It fits me like a glove. When stripped down, the frame weighs little more than the cardboard coaster your post-ride beer sits upon. Why then, would I choose to put a 440g leather saddle on my super lightweight, high tech road bike? Why does that make sense? Because the leather saddle, hand-riveted in Birmingham, England using machines from the 1950s, is the one component where the engineering solution from 1882 is still, for many riders, including me, the best answer available. I ride with a Brooks B17 Special Titanium saddle and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love it for the aesthetics, the history, the ability to be repaired, but most of all, for the fit and comfort it provides.

Brooks England has been making leather goods since 1866, when it was founded in Hockley, Birmingham. Bicycle saddle production began in the 1880s, with the first saddle patent filed in 1882. According to company legend, founder John Boultbee Brooks, a horse saddle manufacturer, tried to use a bicycle after his horse died and found the wooden seat unbearably uncomfortable, prompting him to design a better one. An early version of the iconic B17 saddle launched in 1888, the same year Dunlop developed the pneumatic tire. By 1903, Brooks saddles were on the bikes of Tour de France competitors. [5] Raleigh Bicycle Company bought Brooks in 1962. When Raleigh collapsed in 1999, Brooks went into liquidation before being rescued by two buyers. It is now owned by Selle Royal of Italy, though still manufactured in Smethwick, Birmingham. The B17 has been in continuous production since 1888 and remains Brooks’ best-seller. Leather, rails, and rivets -- three components, individually repairable.

The Brooks B17 is a marvel of design and engineering. The Brooks solution is elegant and counterintuitive: don’t design the saddle to fit the rider. Design the saddle to become the rider. It is as hard as a rock and will hurt your knuckles when you knock on it, making a sound like knocking on a door. Yet, leather, under load and time, conforms. The break-in period, usually around 500 miles, is not a flaw. It is a feature. At the end of it, you have a saddle that is a physical record of your body. Nobody else can ride it comfortably. That is the point. It is the saddle you’ll have for life because it becomes a record of your body and it is built to last a lifetime. It is a lasting example of Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design brought to life. It is useful, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting and as little design as possible. The company’s own repair infrastructure -- saddles repaired by the people who made them, in Birmingham, is the physical manifestation of “long-lasting” as a design principle. The record shows: Brooks didn’t solve the saddle problem for everyone. But it solved it permanently for the riders it fit who were also willing to invest the time to break it in. It creates a symbiotic relationship with the rider as well. As long as the rider takes care of the saddle, the saddle will take care of the rider.

Exhibit B: The Problem

As great and beloved as it is, the Brooks saddle requires an investment: 500 miles of discomfort before the payoff. And it conforms to one body and one position, which means it assumes a body type and a posture. It can’t easily be swapped from a road bike to a mountain bike, for instance. Different body geometry on the bike.

The saddle problem isn’t just about material and craftsmanship or about posture and bike geometry. It’s about anatomy, specifically, the ischial tuberosities (sit bones), which vary significantly by individual. A saddle that doesn’t support them correctly concentrates pressure on soft tissue: nerves, blood vessels, structures that do not appreciate being compressed for hours. The result: pain, numbness, and people who leave the sport. The compensatory behaviors are easily recognized: standing on the pedals, chamois cream, padded shorts. None of these fix the saddle. They manage the failure.

Like many sports, the innovation is highly concentrated around the needs of professional athletes first and foremost. Casual, amateur participants benefit from a halo effect and an innovation pipeline that slowly trickles into the mainstream. Cycling is no different. Similar to other sports, elite cyclists have a body type that is fairly specific to the sport and bike saddles have largely been designed to serve the needs of an elite rider. The average Tour de France GC contender is 5’9”, 140 lbs. [6] In contrast, Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs is 6’5”, 250 lbs and Victor Wembanyama, center for the San Antonio Spurs, 7’4”, 210 lbs. All three are elite athletes. One saddle does not fit all of them. Similarly, Nelly Korda, LPGA golfer is 5’10”, approximately 115 lbs. Caitlin Clark, guard, Indiana Fever is 6’0”, 165 lbs and Serena Williams, professional tennis player and mother of two children is 5’9”, 155 lbs. None of these incredible athletes is the recreational rider doing RAGBRAI. The design brief writes itself.

Exhibit C: Georgena Terry

Enter Georgena Terry, a mechanical engineer and former Xerox employee who founded Terry Precision Bicycles for Women in 1985, the first women-specific cycling company. [7] Fairly quickly, she noticed the women buying her frames were also complaining about saddles. She went to work. In 1991, she filed for her first patent for a women’s specific saddle, which was awarded in 1992. [8]

The forensic question: what decision did she make that was right when the default was to do nothing? She listened to her customers, the overwhelming majority of whom were women. Then, she applied an engineering mindset to a problem the industry hadn’t recognized because they were focused on elite riders. The people with the problem -- in this case, women, but more broadly non-elite riders -- weren’t in the rooms when design and innovation needs were discussed and identified.

Her design featured the now common cut-away centre, as a mechanism for relieving pressure on the soft tissue often crushed by bike saddles. This feature, originally designed by Fred Black in 1932, had largely been forgotten. Terry brought it back, specifically focused on the needs of female riders. In doing so, she became an industry catalyst, changing cycling for the millions of us who will never contend for the maillot jaune (yellow jersey). She was inducted into the US Bicycle Hall of Fame in 2024 for her contributions to the sport. [9]

Exhibit D: The Industry Catches Up

In the decade after Terry’s saddle launched, manufacturers began paying closer attention to the bike saddle and the realization that one size will never fit all began to take hold.

In 2002, SQlab founder Tobias Hild developed a systematic approach to measuring sit bone width to determine ideal saddle size after suffering an injury that left him experiencing numbness when he returned to riding. He connected with a urologist who specialized in cycling ergonomics, and together they identified sit bone distance as the decisive criterion for saddle selection. [10] The insight: sit bone width varies more within genders than between them. A man with wide sit bones needs a wider saddle than a man with narrow ones. Same for women. The solution isn’t a men’s saddle and a women’s saddle. It’s a range of widths, fitted to the individual.

Today, all SQlab saddles are available in up to five different widths. Specialized offers 143/155/168mm width options. Fizik has a saddle finder keyed to sit bone measurement. WTB, Ergon, Selle Italia, and even Brooks, all offer multi-width options or saddle ranges. [11] What Terry started as a women’s solution became the industry’s universal standard because the underlying problem was never about gender -- it was about bodies being different from each other.

The Verdict

The saddle is the contact point where cycling either claims you or loses you. Brooks solved it one way, through material honesty and time. Terry solved it another way, through the decision to ask who was being left out. The sit bone revolution solved it a third way, through measurement and range. Three different answers to the same question: does this saddle fit the actual human body of the actual rider?

When the answer is yes, people ride. They ride centuries and Gran Fondos and RAGBRAI. They ride for decades. They ride when they can no longer run or enjoy high-impact sports. It extends their athletic life, improves their fitness and keeps people healthier longer. And, yes, they ride with a leather saddle on a carbon bike and they wouldn’t trade it for the world.

The B17 has been in production since 1888. It will be in production long after the carbon frame it sits on has been recycled. Some problems, solved correctly the first time, don’t need to be solved again. And sometimes, a problem can be solved in multiple ways to best serve our highly variable human population.

Now, put away the screen and go for a ride.

“The Post-Laundry Bra Pad Shuffle” as it is sometimes called is one of the most unnecessary and irritating modern day laundry chores. It’s a chore within a chore. I am referring to the common ritual of reaching through the small side openings in a sports bra or swimsuit top and untwisting the removable foam padded insert after washing. This time consuming act of deconstructing the “Bra-Pad Origami” that has transpired in the wash cycle is a design crime that robs (mostly) women of valuable time and energy. This is the evidence of a crime of indifference and gendered design failure with no male equivalent. Active, athletic women do this every wash cycle - silently, but with frustration and an equal measure of acceptance. That normalization of unnecessary work is also a crime.

Exhibit A

How did we get here?

To deconstruct this crime and begin our forensic audit, I wanted to examine whether the brief was where this failure began. I started by asking ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Claude to “Create a design brief for a sports bra.” At a high level, one could argue the briefs all met the reasonable person (or should I say ‘designer’?) standard, each delivering an acceptable design brief. I then asked Claude to consolidate the briefs and deliver an optimized brief, presented here as evidence for your consideration.

Exhibit B: Cross-Activity Sports Bra Design Brief

Design Challenge

Design a high-performance cross-activity sports bra that delivers reliable support, sweat management, and all-day comfort across the full range of athletic movement — from lifting and HIIT to running, cycling, and yoga. The garment should perform without compromise and look as considered on the gym floor as it does under a jacket at brunch afterward. The best sports bra is one she forgets she is wearing — secure, comfortable, and supportive without calling attention to itself.

Design Principles

• Control motion across impact levels without restricting breathing or shoulder movement.

• Distribute pressure evenly; eliminate points of friction, digging, and irritation.

• Hybrid support construction (compression + encapsulation) preferred for broader size coverage.

• Accommodate diverse body shapes, torso lengths, and bust profiles.

• Easy on and off — including post-workout, when sweaty and fatigued.

• Aesthetic choices must serve function. Clean lines. Nothing gratuitous.

• Build for longevity: shape, support, and finish must survive repeated use and laundering.

Target User

Active women who train across disciplines and refuse to choose between performance and how they look doing it. She moves between the weight floor, the spin bike, and the yoga mat — sometimes in the same session. She values function first, but expects the garment to meet her everywhere she goes.

Success Criteria

• Controlled bounce and lateral movement at medium-to-high impact.

• Comfortable, distraction-free wear for 60+ minutes of continuous activity.

• Positive fit feedback across diverse body types in wear testing.

• Easy on/off confirmed without excessive effort, post-workout included.

• Structural integrity and finish quality maintained through repeated laundering.

• Wearer forgets she is wearing it during activity — and chooses to keep it on after.

The brief isn’t the villain here. That’s what makes the indifference harder to excuse. The breach was in the standard of care with which the design team responded to the brief. You see, the designers likely met the success criteria outlined in the brief. Where they failed and their indifference took root was not in their understanding of the brief or the business case. Nor was it in their anthropometric work, their understanding of fashion or their understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. It was in their willingness to engage in the user journey. They succeeded right up to the point where the tired, sweaty, post-workout woman came home and had to wrestle and contort her way out of a wet bra that does not want to be wrestled with in the first place, (a crime for another time.)

This is the pattern, every time: Pre-workout, the woman chooses the sports bra, puts it on, adjusts the padding and straps before she even starts to think about training. She trains. She peels the bra off wet. She washes it. She reaches into the pocket to play this ridiculous bra pad origami game and the whole process repeats. Every single time.

Were there no women in the room to raise this flag during the design process? If there were, nobody listened.

This cycle is completely avoidable. Removable pads are the cheapest way to make a sports bra. Better methods that avoid this laundry rage cycle use sewn-in cups, bonded cups, one-piece molded inserts and “stay-put” padding designs. Let’s be clear, sports bras retail from $15 - $120+. The average price is likely in the $40 - $60 range with a landed product cost (materials, manufacturing, shipping, packaging, etc.) of around $16. Manufacturer gross margins are often in the 50% - 70% range and retailer gross margins are often in the 45% - 60% range. Better options for the women wearing these products have negligible margin impact. Our suffering is a feature of the bottom line, not a bug.

This is not a small thing. Every unnecessary friction between a woman and her workout is a negotiation she shouldn’t have to have. She’s already doing the hard part.

The evidence is clear. Better solutions exist. Indifference and the bottom line won. Women pay the price.

Ps. On average, I work out 5 days per week, so that’s 5 sports bras per week. If it takes me 30 seconds to do the shuffle, that’s 2.5 minutes per week. It doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up. Over the course of the last decade, it means I’ve spent 22 hours doing The Post-Laundry Bra Pad Shuffle. Over the course of my life (thus far), I’m closing in on 4 DAYS of this nonsense.

References:

Bra Manufacturing Cost in 2026: Complete Pricing Breakdown for Apparel BrandsHow much does a sports bra cost?E-Commerce Profit Guide for Fitness & Sports Stores (2026)

The first product I wish to put forward in this light is the LAMY Safari Fountain Pen. As a big proponent of hand-written notes, sketching and sketch-noting, honoring a pen is an obvious starting point. I’ve also chosen it because the mainstream design press has largely overlooked this remarkable product.

This iconic pen, first introduced as a fountain pen at the Frankfurt Fair in 1980, and now available as a fountain pen, ballpoint pen, rollerball pen and mechanical pencil, is sold in more than 80 countries with over 15,000 points of sale worldwide. Although exact sales volumes are not published, LAMY acknowledges that after almost 50 years on the market, it is still consistently the best-selling pen in the LAMY range. If that isn’t success, then we have very different ideas about what genuine success looks like.

Exhibit A: The Brief

Interested in expanding into the student market (think adolescents and high-schoolers), LAMY worked with designer Wolfgang Fabian and the Mannheim Development Group under the direction of Professor Bernd Spiegel to develop a fountain pen for students.[1,2] This was a revolutionary concept for the time (late 70s). Fountain pens were either cheap garbage or they were expensive, delicate instruments of sophistication, a not-so-subtle flex. There was nothing in the middle. The very idea of designing a fountain pen that would live in the rough and tumble world of a teenager’s backpack was anathema. As it turns out, it was also an ideal design challenge and an incredible market opportunity.

Professor Spiegel, who revolutionized market research by treating product development as a branch of consumer and behavioral psychology [3], approached this project first, by kicking indifference to the curb. He saw this as a serious design challenge, worthy of great thinking and understanding. He opted to run a large study on adolescents to understand their needs, habits, fears, behaviors and how they used pens. The research was expensive and time-consuming. It was also the decision that made everything else possible. In fact, the research led to the understanding that a successful candidate pen would need to be strong, durable and tough, able to withstand being dropped (repeatedly) and being gripped tightly during use.

The brief was to make a fountain pen for students that was durable, affordable, and teachable. No assumptions were made by the design team. The users weren’t ignored. They were embraced, studied, understood and the pen was created to fulfill their needs - as good design should. Every decision made by Wolfgang Fabian and his collaborators — the ergonomic grip that encourages proper handwriting technique, the flat sides, the swappable nib, the spring clip — answers that brief directly. What makes it special is its sheer simplicity: no clever mechanics, precious metals, or fancy trim. And, in so elegantly solving this problem for students, they also solved issues adults were facing as well. [4]

Exhibit B: The Decisions

Every design decision is defensible. The durable ABS plastic body, a “downgrade” in the category, offered strength and resistance when the pen was dropped or gripped tightly. The ergonomic triangular grip ensures comfortable writing and makes it accessible for beginners and seasoned users alike. The nib can be quickly and independently removed and replaced - even by a 10-yr old, making it cost-effective for everyday users. The “form follows function” philosophy means it has no trendy frills, giving it a timeless look that still feels modern today. This product honors Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design [5], the gold standard for design. In particular, it is useful, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, and thorough to the last detail. In a category defined by ornamentation and status signaling, Fabian and LAMY decided to solve for the user instead. The Safari has been rewarding that decision for 46 years.

Exhibit C: The Record

The Safari Pen was recognized as an “outstanding design achievement” when it won the iF Design Award in 1994. That is the only “official” design accolade this pen has garnered. Going down the rabbit hole of pen enthusiast sites, however, will show the impact and strong positive sentiment this pen has earned over the years. It is a consistent favorite, determined by the people who are passionate about pens and qualified to identify excellence in the category.

Over the years, the pen has evolved ever so slightly. According to Stationery Wiki, “In the mid-to-late 1990s, the pen underwent its most significant revision: the part count dropped from 14 to 11, eliminating costly machined components without touching the clip, nib, or feed. The retail price has changed very little in nearly 30 years.” [6]

The Verdict:

The record has been building for 46 years. Here is the finding of fact. Researching this article, I sought detractions and negative reviews. This was the worst I could find:
The white model looks like a pregnancy test. “The window and the plain white appearance does make it look an awful lot like a pregnancy test.” Not a design indictment, but it landed in print and it’s not entirely wrong [7]. Then, again, this pen pre-dates modern pregnancy tests, so the evidence would suggest it is the test that resembles the pen and not the other way around.

I own two of the rollerball varieties, green and umbra. Pulling the green one out of my bag before a meeting never fails to elicit delight for me because I know that no matter what happens in the meeting, I will enjoy the note taking that is forthcoming.

LAMY had a vision. They hired professionals and empowered them to do the work. The designers didn’t phone it in or do a half-ass job. They solved for the user in a category that never believed anything needed to be solved. Forty-six years later, the record shows it was the right call.

FIFA did not get the memo.

Exhibit A: Origin Story

In June 2013 -- two months after two pressure-cooker bombs killed three people and injured hundreds more at the Boston Marathon finish line -- the NFL announced what it called the All Clear policy. [1] Every bag entering every stadium in the league would henceforth be transparent: clear plastic, vinyl, or PVC, no larger than 12 inches by 6 inches by 12 inches. The stated rationale was security and speed: transparent bags meant faster visual inspection at the gate, shorter lines, and a harder path for anyone trying to conceal a weapon or explosive in a crowd of 70,000 people. It was, at its core, a service design problem. It was not treated as one.

The policy was designed for a specific context: American football, played in American stadiums, attended by an American audience already accustomed to post-9/11 security theater in airports, federal buildings, and public events. The user the NFL had in mind was someone who arrives at a game, gets screened, watches football, and goes home. The design team -- if there was one -- modeled that person and built a rule around them.

What followed was policy as contagion. The spread was informal, uncoordinated, and largely unexamined. By 2016, nearly half of Power 5 university athletic programs had adopted similar requirements for college football and basketball. [2] MLB stadiums followed on a team-by-team basis through the mid-to-late 2010s, with no league-wide mandate -- each franchise simply looked at what the NFL had done and replicated it. [3] Concert venues fell in line by deferring to the stadiums they shared. The logic was circular and self-reinforcing: the NFL did it, so it must be the standard; the standard exists, so we adopt it. Nobody went back to the original problem statement. Nobody asked whether the solution that worked for a Patriots game in Foxborough was the right solution for every large gathering of human beings on American soil.

And then FIFA arrived.

The FIFA Club World Cup 2025, which served as the operational template for the 2026 World Cup, inherited the NFL’s framework wholesale. The dimensions are NFL dimensions. The material requirements are NFL requirements. The clutch exception (4.5 inches by 6.5 inches) is the NFL exception. A policy built thirteen years ago for American football fans at Gillette Stadium is now the governing document for a woman who flew from São Paulo to East Rutherford, New Jersey to watch her national team. [4]

Exhibit B: The Policy

The FIFA Club World Cup 2025 bag policy reads as follows: [5]

“Bags must be made of clear plastic, vinyl, or PVC and no larger than 12in x 6in x 12in (30cm x 15cm x 30cm).”

“Non-clear clutches or wallets about the size of a hand are permitted, as long as they’re no bigger than 4.5in x 6.5in (11cm x 16.5cm).”

“Bags that do not meet size or material requirements may be permitted only for medical reasons.”

“Camera bags, covers, and similar items are generally prohibited, unless they adhere to our clear bag policy.”

That is the complete policy. Two permitted bag types, one medical carve-out, and one named use case: camera bags. FIFA thought to write specific language for photographers. It did not write a single word about menstrual products.

Notice also what the metric equivalents reveal. The primary specification is Imperial -- inches first, centimeters in parentheses, an afterthought. FIFA is a Swiss-based organization governing a tournament with 48 participating nations, the vast majority of whom use the metric system as their primary standard of measurement. The frame of reference was never adjusted. The world was expected to fit the template.

And before anyone reaches for the medical exception: menstruation is not a medical condition. It is a normal, healthy biological process -- as routine as digestion, as universal among half the population as sleep. Classifying it as a medical need in order to access an accommodation is not a solution. It is a category error dressed up as one.

Exhibit C: Who Carries What

I want to be precise here, because precision is how we separate design failure from personal grievance.

Men’s clothing has pockets. Functional pockets -- pockets that hold phones, wallets, keys, medications, and anything else a person needs to move through the world for six to eight hours. When a man passes through stadium security, nothing about his body’s functioning is visible to anyone around him. He empties his pockets into a bin, walks through the detector, collects his things, and proceeds.

Women’s clothing frequently does not have functional pockets. This is not a secret. It is a documented, extensively mocked, widely lamented feature of the apparel industry. And it means that women carry bags -- not as a fashion accessory, but as infrastructure.

Inside those bags, on any given day, for a percentage of women attending any given event, are menstrual products. Pads. Tampons. Perhaps both, for an event that runs six to eight hours from the time they leave their home or hotel until they return after the match. These are not optional items. They are not decorative. They are the functional equivalent of the bathroom stall door -- a private accommodation for a biological reality that is nobody’s business but the person managing it.

The clear bag policy makes them everyone’s business.

As one commentator put it: bag restrictions apply to everyone, but there are no restrictions on pockets. That is a genuine disparate impact, even if the policy is written as gender-neutral. [6] Women, in other words, are being penalized for a security problem they did not create. [7]

Exhibit D: What This Actually Costs

I am not speaking theoretically. I am speaking from the specific, personal calculation that a woman in her teens, 20s, 30s or 40s makes when she learns the venue requires a clear bag.

It is not shame. I want to be precise about that too, because the counterargument will come: we should normalize periods, visibility reduces stigma, there is nothing to be embarrassed about. That argument misses the point entirely. Normalization does not require forced disclosure. I do not have to display my blood pressure medication to prove I am not ashamed of hypertension. I do not have to announce my bathroom schedule to demonstrate comfort with bodily functions. Privacy is not the same thing as shame. Privacy is the door on the stall.

The calculation goes like this: a mixed group of friends, a stadium event, a clear bag, visible products that communicate -- to everyone within eyeline, including people she has not chosen and cannot control -- that she is menstruating, what product she uses, what size, and how many she needs for the duration. She has not consented to any of that disclosure. She is simply trying to attend a very expensive event to cheer on her national team.

Some women buy the clear bag and go. Some women rearrange their supplies around a 4.5-by-6.5-inch clutch that technically fits two tampons and nothing else. Some women just stay home.

That last group is invisible in the data. Nobody counts the women who did not come. Nobody at the NFL in 2013, nobody at FIFA in 2025, sat in the policy design meeting and asked: what does this require of someone who is menstruating? The question was never on the table because the people at the table did not need to ask it. They did not conduct research with real users. They did not run surveys or fan intercepts. They solved the problem they saw and shipped the policy to the world.

Exhibit E: The World Cup

In June 2026, the FIFA World Cup came to the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Sixteen host stadiums. Forty-eight nations. More than 1.2 million international visitors, according to Tourism Economics [8] -- a significant portion of them women, many traveling from countries where this policy does not exist and where nothing in their lived fan experience has prepared them for it.

Consider a woman flying in from Germany for a match. At Allianz Arena in Munich, bag policy is a size restriction: your bag cannot exceed roughly A4 dimensions. [9] It does not have to be transparent. You carry what you need, it gets checked at the gate, and you proceed. She has attended matches her entire life under this model. She has never owned a clear plastic purse. Why would she? Nothing about the FIFA fan materials she received prepared her for what she would encounter at the gate. Let’s be honest, even if it was mentioned, nobody reads the fine print. They confirm they have the tickets and they know where to be when.

She arrives at MetLife Stadium with a normal bag. She is told it is not permitted. She has a choice: return to her hotel, abandon the bag, or transfer her belongings into a clear alternative she does not own and was not warned she would need.

If she is menstruating, she makes that transfer in public. At the gate. In front of strangers.

On the same FIFA Fan Safety page that houses the bag policy, FIFA states that it “supports the IGLFA” -- the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association -- and calls on fans to “play your role in making the FIFA World Cup 2026 an inclusive experience for all.” The FIFA World Cup 2026 Human Rights Framework, published in 2024, requires each of the 16 host cities to develop a human rights action plan covering discrimination, workers’ rights, and human trafficking. FIFA’s Fan Safety page also links to a Fans’ Human Rights Guide and a Global Guide to Discriminatory Practices in Football. [10] [11]

It did not publish a single line addressing what happens when a woman’s bag is non-compliant because her body required her to pack for her biology.

The silence is the design decision. That is how Indifference works -- not through intent, but through the consistent failure to ask who else is in the room.

The Verdict

The clear bag policy is not a conspiracy against women. Nobody designed it to humiliate anyone. It was designed by people solving a perceived security problem after a national tragedy, and those people modeled one kind of user -- a user whose essentials fit in a pocket, whose biology requires no management, whose participation in public life generates no logistical overhead that the policy might inadvertently expose.

That user is not a universal user. He is a default.

When design treats the default as universal, everyone who falls outside the default pays the cost. In this case, the cost is specific and measurable: the forced public disclosure of a private biological function, with no warning, no accommodation, no exception language, and no apparent awareness that the question was ever worth asking.

Camera bags got named. Vague medical needs got a sentence. Women managing their periods got nothing.

That is not an oversight. At this point -- thirteen years after the NFL introduced this policy, with the entire world’s fan base now arriving at American stadiums -- it is a choice. A choice made by not choosing. Which is still a choice.

In the meantime, there is a practical workaround that requires nothing from FIFA, nothing from the NFL, and nothing from the venues. Men have pockets. Capacious, unrestricted, completely private pockets. Columnist Jonathan Stinson suggested that men should start carrying menstrual products for the women in their lives -- load them into those pockets and dare anyone in the security queue to comment when you pull them out with your wallet. [12] It’s a small act of solidarity. It’s also an accidental illustration of exactly what’s wrong: the people the policy forgot have to rely on the people the policy was built for to get inside.

The bathroom has a door. The policy doesn’t.

I am closing in on 2 million miles of air travel with Delta and SkyTeam partners. According to Flighty, since 2007, I have spent 102.2 days in the air and traveled through 97 airports. Over the last 19 years, my top route is the round trip between my home airport, Atlanta (ATL) and Philadelphia (PHL), having made this trip over 100 times, almost always for business. In other words, I know Terminal D at PHL very well. While I occasionally rent a car, it’s far more likely that I use a rideshare service when I’m in the Philly area. The airport has experimented with having drivers pick up passengers in at least four different locations that I can quickly recall. Inside the terminal, at the bottom of the escalator in Terminal D, a sign points left for rideshare and right for passenger pickup, hotel and rental car shuttles. For quite a while, the rideshare location has been consistently down the elevator, left, and left again — denoted by a sign with a large number 7 prominently displayed.

As a frequent traveler, I have my hacks. For the best PHL experience, especially in winter, I order my rideshare before I exit the secured portion of the airport so I’m not standing in the cold longer than necessary. So imagine my surprise on a cold February night at 10:38 PM when the Uber app directed me to Terminal D, Red Zone.

Where is the Red Zone?

I follow the signage at the bottom of the escalator — “Rideshare,” pointing left — and exit the building. Nothing beyond that point directs me anywhere. No Red Zone. My car is less than two minutes away. I’m tired. It’s been a long day of meetings and travel and I have an early start the next morning. I wander toward the location shown in the Uber app and find myself at the familiar number 7 location. The large signs still read “Ride App & Premium Ride App,” so this is probably right. But I still don’t see the Red Zone.

Just as my car arrives, I spot it: a small red band, just above waist height, wrapped around one of the columns of the transit shelter. Roughly two inches tall. It says “Red.” A nearby column has a green band. It says “Green.”

I’m too tired for this.

I found the Red Zone and the Green Zone — no thanks to the airport. On the ride into the city, I wondered whether I’d simply missed something. I made a note to check on my next trip. It turns out I had not missed any signage, because there was no signage to miss.

Here is the design failure, stated plainly: PHL implemented a color-coded zone system for rideshare pickups — a system their operational partners, Uber and Lyft, had incorporated into their apps. The apps were updated. The passenger environment was not. The airport designed a system for their operational partners and forgot to design it for the people standing in the cold at 10:38 PM. They introduced a new wayfinding layer without the wayfinding infrastructure to support it, then handed the resulting confusion to their most exhausted customers.

This is not a minor oversight. It is a textbook use error.

The resources to get this right are not obscure. The FAA publishes Advisory Circular 150/5360-12F [2], which provides comprehensive guidance on airport terminal and landside wayfinding, signing, and graphics. It is built on the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Report 52, Wayfinding and Signing Guidelines for Airport Terminals and Landside [3] — the definitive industry resource on this subject. The Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) [4], with 46 chapters across 36 countries including one in Philadelphia, exists precisely to solve problems like this one. The playbook and the talent were available. Neither were consulted.

ACRP Report 52 is unambiguous about what effective signage requires. Section 2.2.6 identifies five criteria every sign must meet: it must be conspicuous, with sufficient color contrast to be detected from its surroundings; comprehensible, meaning its intent is clear to users who were not involved in its design; legible at the distance from which a user is likely to first look for it; and positioned at decision points — the moments where a traveler must choose a path. A two-inch color band at waist height on a structural column fails on all four counts. The report also explicitly names “familiar passengers when changes are made” as a distinct user category requiring systematic consideration. [5] I am that user. The color zone rollout was that change. By the standard of the report PHL itself helped validate, I was owed clear guidance at the moment of decision.

The consequences of this kind of failure are also well-documented. Report 52 states directly: “Violation of user expectations will result in losing passenger confidence in the airport’s wayfinding system, which in turn will create a negative perception.” [6] The report further warns that color coding, if not carefully implemented, “can make a basically simple terminal more confusing and complex.” [7] PHL deployed color coding without the signage infrastructure to support it and proved the warning correct.

The richest irony is this: PHL is not an anonymous offender. The airport is held up by name in the ACRP’s own practitioner literature as a model implementation of Report 52 — praised specifically for its “high contrast and legibility, even illumination in all conditions.” [8] The model airport violated the model. The case study airport became the cautionary tale.

In place of confidence and ease, PHL delivered friction and panic. Rather than treating arriving passengers (like me) as the beneficiaries of a better system, the airport treated them as an afterthought to their own operational improvements.

The user was not the error. The design was.

References: [1] 14 CFR § 121.471 — https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-G/part-121/subpart-Q/section-121.471 [2] FAA Advisory Circular 150/5360-12F [3] ACRP Report 52 — https://crp.trb.org/acrpwebresource2/acrp-report-52-wayfinding-and-signing-guidelines-for-airport-terminals-and-landside/ [4] SEGD — https://segd.org/ [5] ACRP Report 52, Section 2.2.4 [6] ACRP Report 52, Section 2.3.3 [7] ACRP Report 52, Section 3.6.5 [8] ACRP Impacts on Practice, IOP 020 (September 2015)

I’m sorry, what? There are 7 button-like objects in a vertical column. At first glance, they all appear to be pressable. Two have red bezels, drawing the eye to indicate priority actions - or maybe these are indicators not to touch? Three of the “buttons” require keys. Two have etched in, red lettering. Three have printing on the bezels. And, then, there is the otherwise unmarked button at the very bottom that the hotelier has applied a press-on sticker that says “PRESS FOR ELEVATOR” along with two arrow stickers pointing to the button. The arrows aren’t the same shape or color. And you have wasted 30 seconds of your life that you will never get back just trying to get to your hotel room. This is not an anomaly. This is a pattern.

The evidence suggests it is easier to design a high-complication mechanical watch with 500 - 1,000 individual components that fits on your wrist and is powered by nothing more than a coiled spring.

Six buttons for four floors, set in a grid that, at first glance appears as though it might be 15 buttons. Why is the emergency call button illuminated as a default setting? And the icon above the buttons is a wireless Wifi symbol. Are we anticipating needing Wifi to travel between 4 floors? If so, the control panel is the least of the issues with this elevator.

Entrance to the building lobby located on the P4 level. Except there is no button labled “P4”. We have P1 - P3 and P5 - P7. There is a “star 4”. In all likelihood, most users will be able to navigate this, but was the pattern disruption necessary? The button could have been labeled “P4” to match the signage, thus reducing the cognitive load and dissonance for the user.

We have mastered the mechanical watch, but not the elevator.

This elevator only travels between 3 floors, but it might require five keys and a key card to get where you are going. It’s very unclear. The vertical 1, 2, 3 buttons are duplicated as a horizontal row that may also be buttons. They appear to be the same size and shape as the buttons below. Or they could be floor indicators. The evidence is inconclusive.

The more you look at this panel, the more confusing it becomes with two door open buttons and two door closed buttons and a button that is totally unmarked. Nobody labeled it. Nobody tested whether you’d press it. Nobody cared.

I. Just. Want. To. Go. To. My. Room. Why? Who thought this was a good idea? How did this pass quality control? Could the P’s be grouped together? Could the Rs be grouped together? Could the 1s be grouped on a horizontal line with the 2s above it and the 3s above them . . . ?

Are you fucking kidding me?? It would seem this elevator goes up, down, left and right and has floors with intuitive indicators like C, CF, and HL. CF is sometimes referred to as “4” apparently. And L and 6 are the same floor. Did this control panel spring forth from the seventh circle of Hell?

The elevator control panel is not a complex design problem. It is a finite one: a box, two directions, a countable number of floors. What you have just seen is not the result of a hard problem poorly solved. It is the result of no one solving it at all. That is Indifference. And it is the most common villain in the designed world.

When Elon Musk announced the Cybertruck in 2019, he hailed it as a cyberpunk vehicle inspired by “Blade Runner” and “The Spy Who Loved Me.” The prototype he drove on stage didn’t get the memo. It’s polarizing — people love it, hate it, love to hate it — and it deserves credit for attempting to reimagine what a modern passenger truck might be. The people who immediately put money down to reserve a Cybertruck, and who later took delivery, believed in the vision and in Musk’s ability to deliver against it.

The first Cybertrucks were delivered on November 30, 2023.

Through early 2026, fewer than 70K Cybertrucks have been sold. In Q4 2025, 20% of those sold in the U.S. went to other Musk-owned companies, making him his own best customer [1].

The Cybertruck can’t be sold in the European Union. The EU determined its exterior design imperils pedestrians. EU rules require vehicle exteriors to be designed to minimize damage to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists during a collision. The Cybertruck’s rigid steel body has sharp edges that fail to meet these requirements. The high-strength steel and lack of crumple zones to absorb energy during an impact add additional peril for other road users. These are not regulatory technicalities. These are findings. The case for a design crime has been made by people whose job it is to make that case.

“Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.” — Dieter Rams

The stainless steel body panels are cut by a 5-axis laser, then scored and bent, origami style, to form the body. This is interesting and very cool. The problem is a lack of finishing on the exposed edges.

The jagged, raw laser cut lines are visible in multiple places around the vehicle — places you might place your hand, like the edge of the door frame or the outside of the truck bed. The edges are sharp. The internet is full of videos showing people slicing carrots, cucumbers, zucchini and bananas using the frunk lid [2]. Tesla deployed a software update (firmware version 2024.14.3) in May 2024 to address safety concerns, but the algorithm still wants the frunk to close and will apply increasing pressure to make it happen [3]. There are also videos of people shaving carrots on the edge of the door [4]. You do not want the door of your car to be sharp enough to shave a carrot. If it is, your leg will eventually be the victim. The EU’s case has been made.

Another detail lacking in care and accuracy: panel gaps. Known as “parallelism,” a key goal in automotive manufacturing is uniform gap widths across every seam. Most modern cars target around 3/16 of an inch (4-5mm). High-end luxury vehicles run tighter. Early on, Musk demanded all components be built to within a 10-micron window accuracy. “That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters, and tolerances need to be specified in single digit microns.” [5] Yet, precision panel alignment still appears to be a suggestion rather than an ironclad requirement — as though the lead manufacturing quality engineer was, in fact, a 6th grader in an industrial arts class. The craftsmanship is inexcusable at this price point. It is disrespectful to the people who believed in the vision and handed over their hard-earned money for this vehicle.

To date, there have been 11 recalls: accelerator pedals that could stick, failing windshield wiper motors, trim pieces that detach while driving, rear-view camera display failures. The most recent involves potential wheel separation due to the wrong grease and loose nuts. (By comparison, the Tesla Model S has had 39 recalls since June 2012 indicating a trend. [6])

Elon Musk has proven, repeatedly, that he can demand and achieve extraordinary precision when he decides it matters. Rocket boosters caught by mechanical chopsticks. Battery cells manufactured to tolerances measured in microns. When Tesla’s CEO wants precision, he gets precision. The Cybertruck tells you exactly what he decided didn’t matter. You. And your money.

This is evidence.

The Hyundai Venue is currently the least expensive new car sold in the U.S. at $20,550 [7]. Compared to the Cybertruck, its exterior build quality is a master class in precision. It carries the best warranty in the industry: 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain, bumper-to-bumper for 5 years/60,000 miles. Fewer than five recalls in six years on the market. Car and Driver rates it 8/10 and it retains value better than the Cybertruck. This is a car that respects the people who buy it.

When design leadership fails to respect the buyer, you end up with a Cybertruck.

This wasn’t an engineering limitation. It was a priority decision. You can catch a rocket booster with chopsticks or you can finish the edges on a $100,000 truck. Apparently, you cannot do both.

I felt like a dick for writing on the bottles. I’m also exhausted by the fact that I had to.

That’s the thing about hotel toiletries. They’re provided as a luxury. They’re experienced as a puzzle. And somewhere between the brand partnership announcement and the guest’s 6am shower, the person who actually had to use the product stopped mattering.

Hotel toiletries weren’t always an expectation. Before 1970, if you forgot your shampoo, you were simply out of luck. The Four Seasons London changed that, introducing bathroom amenities as a luxury differentiator. Mid-tier chains followed through the ‘80s as competition intensified and guest expectations hardened. Then TSA’s 3-1-1 rule in 2006 finished the job: carry-on travelers stopped packing liquid toiletries entirely, and hotels responded by expanding what they stocked. The humble shampoo bottle became, quietly, one of the most loaded brand statements in hospitality.

The mini bottle’s days were already numbered before sustainability became a marketing strategy. Clean the World founder Shawn Seipler estimates that 5 million hotel soap bars are discarded globally every day [1] — hygiene protocols require disposal regardless of whether the product was touched. The waste problem created the business case for wall-mounted dispensers: lower cost, less plastic, a sustainability story to put in the annual report. What nobody asked, in any of those transition meetings, was whether the guest could read the dispenser at 6am in a steamy shower. That question wasn’t in the brief. It never is.

Picture this: A team of toiletry brand representatives arrives at hotel corporate headquarters, meeting with representatives from multiple sub-brands. They bring out the samples and talk about how amazing and luxurious each product is, how it’s vegan, not tested on animals and free of whatever chemicals are on the bad list today. The hoteliers test the lotions. Perhaps they even test the shampoo and conditioner on their hands. Maybe a few of them take the bottles home to give the product a real test. Decisions are made. Procurement gets involved. Contracts are written. Months later, some poor schlub like me ends up naked, wet and squinting at the bottles mounted on the shower wall in a hotel, trying to figure out where to start, which one is which. And, in a fit of rage - at the shampoo brand for their poor labeling, at the hotel for creating this “luxurious” mess, and at myself for forgetting to mentally document the crime scene before taking off my glasses and hopping in the shower - we take matters into our own hands and invoke the power of the Sharpie.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
(Attributed variously to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Samuel Johnson)

To be clear, absolutely nobody at the hotel HQ or at the toiletry manufacturer ever set out to make the travel experience worse. They all want it to be as amazing as possible with their brand linked to the warm, fuzzy feeling of happiness they envision for the traveler. But they approach this from a procurement mindset rather than an experiential mindset. They don’t question the brief, just the quantities and the costs. They don’t interrogate the product in context. They don’t do the research with users needed to identify these issues.

Labels are only one of the issues with hotel toiletries. The scents are another nightmare for the weary traveler. Here’s a list of a few I’ve encountered along the way:

• Beach & sky blue water

• Lemon & sugar

• Green tea lemongrass

• Sicilian tangerine

• Heavenly gingerlily

• Indian cress

• Notes of aniseed, cardamom and geranium leaf

• Notes of grapefruit peel, basil and geranium

• Notes of grapefruit, tangerine peel and rum

• Desert lime, lotus leaf, lavender

• Rose & shea

• Warm Oak

• Mandarin & vetiver

• Eucalyptus & lavender

• Citrus, nutmeg & ginger

• Eucalyptus

• Lemon sage

• Rum

• Peppermint

• Cilantro

• Rosemary geranium

• Sicilian blood oranges

• Volcanic minerals & Sicilian lemons

• Coconut mango

What recipe are we following here? Not one of them says “clean.” They say “brunch,” “spa menu,” “craft cocktail bar,” and “farmer’s market.” Warm Oak says “my grandfather’s study.” Mandarin & vetiver says “department store cologne counter.” Lemon sage says “rotisserie chicken”.

Is there really a market for cilantro scented conditioner? Am I a salsa?

Who knew we wanted to bathe in (and smell like) rum, rather than drink it?

My most recent business trip involved a stay in a hotel and spa resort where Lockwood toiletries were featured. The scent was rosemary geranium - and it was a bit heavier on the rosemary than I would have liked.

When I looked this product up online, I was rewarded by seeing it featured as one of “The Best Men’s Skin Care Products Everyone Should be Using”

and one of the “32 Amazing Father’s Day Gifts That Aren’t Socks and a Tie”.

There were more headlines and lists along this same theme. So, my hotel selected toiletries “Guaranteed to please even the fussiest of Dads” for their rooms. I’m not a Dad. I’m not even a fussy Dad. I’m a middle-aged woman and I don’t want to smell like anyone’s Dad. Nor do I want to smell like a cocktail or a marinade.

Marriott. Hilton. IHG. Between them: nearly 3 million rooms, 23,000 hotels, 144 countries. That is not a supply chain constraint. That is leverage. One of you could fix this before I finish my next business trip. Until then, I’ll keep bringing my Sharpie. And I’ll keep feeling like a dick about it.

(Part 3 of a 3 part series)

Ps. If you’ve ever thought about taking the full size shampoo bottles from the hotel room, this is a great listen: Shampoo, Property Rights, and Civilization (with Anthony Gill)

Walk the shampoo aisle. Every brand makes the same declaration: the brand name comes first. The logo is largest. The product type — shampoo, conditioner, body wash — is the afterthought nestled near the bottom of the bottle, just above the legally required volume of the bottle. The exception to this rule, when it exists, is the celebration of a sub-brand. Not a user need. A marketing architecture.

This isn’t a design failure. It’s a briefing failure. The graphic designer who chose that script font didn’t wake up wanting to make your morning harder. They were solving the problem they were handed: Get the brand noticed on a crowded store shelf, six feet away, under fluorescent lights, in a three-second consideration window. They solved it. They just weren’t asked to solve your problem. The person who wasn’t in the room: anyone trained to ask what happens after the purchase. After the shelf. In the shower. At 6 am. Naked, wet, and squinting because you don’t shower while wearing your glasses.

The accountability chain is straightforward. Marketers set the brief. Graphic designers execute it. No one in that chain is trained — or required — to ask whether the user can identify the contents without their glasses in a steamy shower at 6 am. Industrial designers and UX designers don’t get a seat at the table because the problem was never framed as a usability or accessibility problem. It was framed as a visibility problem. Visibility problems have a different solver. That’s not just vanity. That’s vanity structuring the room so usability indifference has a front row seat.

The information hierarchy on a shampoo bottle is a confession. Read it forensically.

The hierarchy often follows this pattern:

1. Logo/Brand Name

2. Sub-Brand or Product Description (e.g. Intensive Repair, Bond Protein Repair, Daily Moisture, Style Reviving, etc.)

3. Product Promise or Reasons to Believe (e.g. Trusted by Professionals)

4. Ingredients / Free From [Ingredients]

5. Contents in the Bottle (e.g. Shampoo, Conditioner, Dry Shampoo, Body Wash, Mousse, Hair Spray, etc.)

6. Scent or Fragrance

7. Container Volume (ounces & milliliters) - always anchored at the bottom

The contents in the bottle is almost always located on the lower one/third of the bottle. The visible distinction between shampoo and conditioner may be as subtle as the words themselves. Perhaps one is reversed out in a block of color - or maybe there is an outline around the word or a highlight. That’s often as much affordance as the user gets.

To further exacerbate this problem, the words SHAMPOO and CONDITIONER seem to appear in ALL-CAPS the overwhelming majority of the time. For users, this actually might make the situation worse - especially for those of us requiring corrective lenses to read. Mixed case words have ascenders - like the “d” and the “t” in conditioner and descenders - like the “p” in shampoo - that provide pattern recognition clues for readers. Words that appear in all caps are simply blocky and present a uniform shape.

The choice of font and font style can also affect the readability. Condensed fonts and fonts with thin line weights are challenging to read in the best of circumstances, so a steamy shower is right out. Similarly, chunky, bold, black lineweights can also impede readability and further contribute to the blocky, uniform shape problem when all caps are used.

Color and contrast are the one lever most brands get close to right. Close. But there are always exceptions. (We see you Monday. We can’t read your bottles, but we see you.)

Bottle and cap/dispenser colors are still other levers that could be used to help users make clear choices in their moments of need and yet, very few brands take advantage of this. Too many brands use the exact same bottle and cap/dispenser color for their complementary products. Literally, the only difference are the words “SHAMPOO” or “CONDITIONER” printed on the bottle. (We see you, Verb and we appreciate this affordance even if the rest of your labeling could be improved.)

These are all choices made in service of selling the product in the store. Better choices exist. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3) has Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that can easily be adapted for print. In fact, they provide guidance for doing this. WCAG 2.0 AA specifies contrast ratios, minimum font sizes, font legibility, mixed case formatting, and white space.

ISO 19809 also provides guidance for use of simplified tactile indicators on similar‑shaped packages: ensure adequate size, and put marks where users naturally touch. This is voluntary, however and not specific to shampoo, conditioner or body wash, and brands are free to interpret this guidance as they see fit. P&G’s Herbal Essences bottles use a very minimal “code”: four vertical lines molded near the bottom of shampoo bottles and two rows of raised dots in the same position on conditioners so users can tell them apart by touch.

The system was developed with P&G’s inclusive design lead, Sumaira Latif (who is blind), and Domino Printing - yet this system was also designed for the store shelf! It has challenges in the shower where these products often sit nestled in shower caddies or perched on the shoulders of the bathtub, requiring extra effort to interact with the lower part of the bottles. Voluntary compliance. Inclusive intent. Structural failure anyway.

Marketers: You approved the brief. You signed off on the packaging. You sent it to market. At no point did anyone ask: can someone who needs this product actually use it in the moment they need it most? Not on the shelf. In the shower. At 6 am. Without their glasses.

That question wasn’t in the brief. It still isn’t. And until someone puts it there, the answer will keep being “no.”

(Part 2 of a 3 part series)

Consider your morning routine. The alarm goes off and the clock starts ticking on the day. Autopilot kicks in. Coffee. Shower. Clothes. Hair. Breakfast. Work. The shower is where we do our best thinking, but we only do thist type of thinking when we are unencumbered by cognitive distraction. We rely on routine and the compensatory behaviors we’ve created to accommodate products that don’t accommodate us.

In our homes, we are creatures of habit. Our showers and bath tubs are organized to minimize the need for cognitive processing. We don’t think about how to turn the water on or how to activate the shower. We buy the same one or two brands of toiletries every time. We put them in our bathtubs and showers in the same place and in the same order. We know where our shampoo is. We know what color the bottle is, how the dispenser works, etc. We can differentiate this product from the body wash (or bar soap) and the conditioner due to location, bottle type/shape, content color, scent, etc.

We have an order of operations too. Much like the toilet paper (over or under) debate, people have strong feelings about what comes first. You are either a shampoo - conditioner - soap/body wash person or you are a soap/body wash - shampoo - conditioner person. You don’t mix things up. That’s just chaos. The rote behavioral patterns tame the chaos and allow us to get on with our day. This has become so routine and normal, that when you do find yourself thinking about it in the moment, you may not remember what you’ve done already. “Wait. Did I condition my hair?” Is a refrain I have on a semi-regular basis as the coffee and the shower kick in and I actually start to wake up. There’s intelligence in our internal autopilot - particularly with the demands of the bigger world waiting on the other side of the bathroom door.

Our adaptability as humans is a survival mechanism and it serves us well. It’s also a super power that brands have exploited whether intentionally or not. The fight for share of wallet has turbocharged the power and hubris of brands.

In 1915, The Coca-Cola Company sought a way to differentiate their brand and to protect it from look-alike competitors. They issued a creative brief for a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” With that simple brief, the iconic “Georgia Green” glass Coke bottle was born, conceived by The Root Glass Company, the bottle not only changed the Coca-Cola brand, it unleashed the power of design as a brand and market differentiator. This was also a moment of truth. The bottle was branded Coca-Cola and the contents of the bottle were, in fact, Coca-Cola. There was no guessing needed. Soon other brands sought to differentiate themselves in similar ways, particularly in the commodity world of food, beverages and toiletries. But, somewhere along the way, manufacturers lost the plot and the brand labeling and packaging became more important than the contents they contained. The betrayal had begun. It was subtle at first. There was still some distinction in color and shape of bottles, especially in toiletries. Over time, containers became more and more homogenous. This was partly the economics of mass production of bottles that were out of patent and could be used by any brand - simply change the label or maybe the color plastic used in the bottle, the cap or the dispensing unit - and partly the increasing competition for retail shelf space. Normalization of sizing and shelf density took hold. CPG companies wanted as many units on store shelves as possible. And the betrayal accelerated.

Today, the shampoo aisle is a sea of sameness. There are generally only a few bottle shapes - the cylinder, the monolith, the hourglass and the inverted pyramid with a flip top at the bottom. The brand names scream at you. The bottles are pearlescent white or soft pastels like pink and purple. Some are black plastic or dark brown, green or grey. A quick glance may help you identify the brand, but not the contents. That is the true betrayal. You can only determine the contents with a discerning eye and great intent. Perhaps the brand has gifted you, the consumer, with a tiny hint - maybe a slightly lighter (or darker) colored bottle or a different cap color. Realistically, they are too busy screaming their brand name (Pick MEEEEE!) to notice (or care) that you can’t read the label.

And, so, you have adapted to their poor design choices. You quietly created a system to reduce the likelihood that you will inadvertently shave your legs with the conditioner. Your response to the betrayal is to error-proof your shower because the manufacturers don’t care if you misuse the products. In fact, the sooner you run out, the better. You’ll be back to buy more. You didn’t become brand loyal because the product is better. You became brand loyal because switching brands would mean rebuilding a system you never should have had to build in the first place. The next time you reach for the same bottle without thinking, ask yourself: is this loyalty, or is this the sunk cost of invisible labor? Because there’s a difference. And the brands are counting on you never knowing it.

(Part 1 of a 3 part series)

Early in my career, I had a boss who told a very frustrated young designer that not everything would be good enough to go into my portfolio. He told me that sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, the client wants dog shit and my job was to give them the best dog shit I could and then to shake it off and move on to the next (hopefully better) project. I went to design school to create amazing things. And, deep inside, I knew he was right. It’s been almost 30 years to the day since that conversation and I still desperately want him to be wrong, but I look around and, well, nobody meant to design this world, but here we are.

My career has spanned tiny agencies, global consulting, giant corporations and everything in between. I’ve spent thirty years on both sides of this table — as the designer, the consultant, and the executive who sometimes made the call I knew was wrong (or at least, “less right” than it should have been.) I’ve been in the belly of the beast and have been complicit with it at times. We all have. I know and have worked with incredibly brilliant designers, strategists, marketers, engineers and business executives. Nobody is rolling up their sleeves with the intention of doing mediocre work. We want to do great things. We want to win awards - yes, vanity and ego are our dopamine. And, yet, all of those great intentions fall victim to 10,000 nicks, scrapes and paper cuts and before you know it, the patient is dead on the table and nobody knows why. Was it removing features to save money? Did we avoid the hard conversations about how difficult this work actually was? It’s more than that. We were afraid to speak truth to power.

I wish there were a root cause, but there isn’t. It’s all of these things and 10,000 more just like them. And, so, we plug along, doing our best, choosing our battles, deciding which hills are worth dying on and which ones aren’t. The end result is a sea of mediocrity in “designed” products and experiences. It manifests in every one of us willingly adopting compensatory behaviors to navigate the built environment and subpar products around us. We put tape over buttons we don’t want pressed. We put labels on switches and remote controls. We microwave everything for one minute, because, truthfully, it’s the only cooking setting we understand. We leave the long, itchy labels in our shirts because if we cut them out, we won’t remember the cleaning instructions - or, we just wash everything in cold water and tumble dry on low, and hope for the best.

My plan of attack.

I want to formalize my investigation into some of these failures (and the occaissional success story!) I want to anger the consumers who busy themselves printing labels and paying for obscure features they can’t use and don’t understand. My goal is to help frame better reasons for every designer, engineer and business executive to fight for one more hill, one more feature, one more round of testing or research.

I want to eliminate the shit sandwich approach to critiquing work. Say something nice. Say something that’s true, but hard to hear. Say something nice again. Fuck that. It doesn’t help anyone and it’s how we got here. I want to bring back the old-school design critique, the one where the professor walks the wall, assesses the work and tears the crap work off the wall, crumples it into a ball and moves on. We have to interrogate the work to make it better and push the designer who gave up too soon to feel compelled to do more. This is how we get to work that empowers our business partners to be fearless in advocating for better ideas. Long term value isn’t built with mediocre crap and we aren’t going to AI our way out of this.

Welcome to Use Error. I’m not here to make you feel better about the world we built. I’m here to make you angry enough to build a different one.