Psychology of Everyday Things

Volume 1, Issue 1

April 4, 2013

Lynne BivonaLynne Bivona

Pre-sliced cheese in easy to open and re-sealable packaging is appealing and eco-friendly too! No more individually wrapped slices like Kraft does so wastefully. Never again will you place remaining slices in aluminum foil destined for landfills. No, this cheese is easy to open (“tear here”) and is easy to close back up again (“re-sealable”). You will be so pleased with it, until you try it.

Chances are, if you have ever tried using this packaging, it has failed

Re-sealable Packaging

you once or twice. For some, it has failed you every time. At some point, during what would seem a straightforward process of getting to the cheese, it gets complicated. People have been known to use a knife to hack away at the packaging, making the promise of the seal irrelevant.

There are a few design issues here. One is

“affordance”: re-sealable packaging affords opening and closing. There is also a feedback constraint. Even

the most successful opening of these packages can leave you wondering about the success of the seal when you try to close the package up again. There’s no sound to indicate a tight seal and you have little reason to trust that anything in this process is as easy as you had imagined.

Lamp Switches

You’re in a hotel room at night, you close your book, sink your head into the pillow and reach out one hand to turn off the light. You feel under the bulb for something to turn or push, maybe a string to pull. No luck. You feel on the base of the lamp and then move toward the cord to turn a disc. Not there either. Finally, you sit up and examine the lamp with your eyes that just want to be closed. Usually, you get lucky and can finally find the hidden switch, perhaps on the very top of the lamp or

on another panel alongside it. Other times, you resort to unplugging the whole thing and calling it a dark night.

We have conceptual models in our minds of how we expect table lamps to work. Visible and tactile clues help us to turn them on and off, usually quite automatically. There are many different ways to turn off and on lamps and our minds can map out most of them. Sometimes, however, we’re foiled. There always seems to be a new

and clever way to

masquerade a lamp switch.

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