This is the philosophy that they use when building spacecraft. Most sensors and instruments on the Voyager craft have been turned off to conserve power, but they continue to function enough to still communicate with Earth.
In tabletop game design there’s a similar concept of “collapsing gracefully” - where an rpg is designed to preserve as much fun as possible when you forget the rules.
I used to push so hard for this when building websites, but was often forced (by clueless PMs mostly) to make sure it looked the exact same on every old busted ass browser that they or the clients grandma could load the damn thing on.
This was 9+ years ago mind, I’ve moved on and make shit you can hold and touch now. No more organizing electrons.
I googled “Muji flashlight” because I had no idea who or what Muji was, and found this:
Muji is a Japanese homewares, clothing and snacks chain known for simple elegant designs. Shirts, but only 100% cotton in white or indigo, for example. We bought from them a lot in Taiwan, and were quite pleased when they opened in Oregon
Manufacturers: Best I can do is planned obsolescence.
I appreciate the thought but for a flashlight it seems like over-designing that will just result in an unnecessarily high price. If you put in all batteries at the same time they will all run out at the same time too, so this won’t be useful in practice.
Obviously this flashlight was not designed for you. There are plenty of situations in which a flashlight is a critical piece of equipment.
It is very useful in practice when you have a dead flashlight during a storm and only a few batteries in the kitchen drawer.
But it would likely be cheaper to buy an extra set of backup batteries than to buy that flashlight.
Its usefulness is based on the unexpected, not the expected.
So you don’t appreciate the thought
I appreciate that they care about being innovative, trying to solve problems that haven’t been solved before or just solving them in a better way. I appreciate that they don’t just lazily take the conservative approach and rehash what’s been done a thousand times before. In the end that’s necessary to move society forward. Their efforts just didn’t turn out well in this particular instance. I hope they do next time.
Gotta admit I enjoyed this comment way too much.
Kudos good sir/madam and I hope you have an amazing day
If your batteries voltage doesn’t match the voltage of your LED you need a voltage regulator anyway. All you need is to design it in such a way that it will always provide something close to the right voltage (at the expense of run time when fewer batteries are available).
IIRC the Logitech wireless mice work that way too. They can take one or two batteries. Use two for long life or only one if you prefer a lighter mouse.
I think the killer feature of that design is the ability to use two different sizes of battery and function no matter what is used. I’m not sure if I would personally ever put myself in a situation where I ran out of AA’s and only had AAA’s now that I bought myself a good supply of rechargeable ones, but I think that is a genuinely useful feature.
Wish my body was built this way. I step on a Lego or eat a bad shrimp and I am just out.
Well, you don’t die, do you? That’s exactly the point. You keep breathing even with a lego in your stomach. Or something.
I assure you there is nothing graceful about it.
LIKE US.
Does anyone have a better example of this opposite of planned obsolescence idea haha
There are many examples in software engineering. You have probably encountered many of them online and didn’t even notice.
For example, a website that under load starts to serve cached content only. If more load is imposed it will stop serving ads and on yet more load it will render fewer articles per page, etc.
It’s one of those things that when you’re doing it right people will think you’re not doing anything at all.
I wouldn’t really call this graceful degradation, more “convenient/good design.” Since changing batteries is sort of a regular occurrence for a flashlight. But the sentiment is appreciated regardless.
Graceful degradation is a sub field of resilience engineering - designing systems for resilience. Resilience necessarily reduces efficiency. It was observed during Covid for example that our logistics systems were organised around efficiency as opposed to resilience.
Planned obsolescence, or its engineering term: design life, is also geared towards efficiency.
It’s important to note that neither is in itself a bad thing, we have to design around need. Spending effort on resilience only for the user to throw it away is a massive waste, for example.
This was posted in another community recently, so I’m copying my comment from that:
I learnt about graceful degradation in relation to escalators and how they compare to elevators/lifts. Basically escalators become stairs, whereas lifts become cages.
It’s been one of my favourite design concepts, alongside hidden design (design which improves things without being apparent/in your face about it)
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it’s unrelated to planned obsolescence as in it’s not about designing things to last, but for a design to be functional even if there’s some issue outside the control of the product design. You can get graceful degradation along with planned obsolescence, they’re not mutually exclusive.
Reminds me of the differences in design cultures in different companies, though I heard it in relation to countries but idk if that was a stereotype or not. What I heard was about differences in design philosophies towards a similar goal of a good product: one company over engineered their stuff to last a long time, whereas the other company relied on redundancy by putting in a second of anything that was likely to fail in parallel to the original.
Escalators vs elevators is maybe a good example of the concept in theory, but in practice escalators are the worse design of the two, and they don’t necessarily compete anyway.
Escalators are either slightly faster stairs or stairs for the sedentary. Their only practical advantage is clearing high-volume areas quickly, like transit stations. But otherwise, they are worse stairs - costly, narrow, power consuming mechanical stairs that require regular maintenance. Elevators are an accessibility feature. They allow easy movement of the handicapped and large cargo, and can move many, many floors quickly. Nobody is taking escalators to the 57th floor of a building.
Not to say escalators don’t have that advantage of failing in a useful way, just that they don’t do anything stairs don’t already do. Nothing else really does what elevators do.
Better example may be, say, ebikes or hybrid cars, provided they don’t lock up the conventional drive system in the event the electric portion fails.
Agreed, as I mentioned that’s the context in which I learnt of the concept, maybe because it’s the easiest to grasp for a layman, but it’s certainly not the best as you demonstrated. I still would probably use it to explain because it’s a known quantity, but I agree with your point.
I’m interested in any good examples of hidden design you can think of.
I’m assuming you listen to the podcast 99% invisible?
I don’t actually, I never really got into podcasts for some reason, exception is I do end up watching wvfrm but nothing else.
As for good examples of invisible design, there is nothing that I can think off the top of my head, I guess it’s just as invisible to me. Jokes aside, the only example coming to my head rn is not the best example, it’s of the slit in old macbooks for activity indication light (IIRC). It was so thin that it was literally invisible to the naked eye unless the light was shining, so it’s kind of playing up to the concept itself, in turn making it noticeable and not actually following the principle I mentioned.
After racking my brain quite a bit I did come up with an example: pinch to zoom, it’s very high level as an example but you would realise it’s intuitiveness if you have ever seen someone try to apply it to the real world. Invisible design is an issue because of this, because it’s supposed to get out of the way and so you just don’t notice in day to day life, it only becomes noticeable when it suddenly is not there.
This is also a philosophy for building web apps - flexibility to still work if client features are unavailable rather than breaking or refusing to work at all. Someone having JavaScript turned off, for instance - some sites will show you no content with a “JavaScript is required” notice, while others are made to at least display the basic page.
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When I led a small dev team making an ecom site I pushed this approach to JavaScript–you should be able to create an account, manage your cart, and check out without JavaScript. All extras with JavaScript just enhance this functionality. Add to cart without leaving the page, a mini cart, client side validation.
Sadly with the rise of SPAs, this concept is totally out the window.
That sounds like a real pain, as if you want to make functionality on old tech, then use new to “spruce it up” that’s not redundancy nor graceful degradation, it’s just developer torture
To be fair, this was ~12 years ago and the web has changed a lot since then. But being able to submit a form without js still seems reasonable to me… it also means you are doing proper backend validation. Something I’ve noticed newer devs sometimes have no concept of.
The concept doesn’t only apply to enabling JavaScript. The web standards are continuously evolving and you often have browsers that aren’t quite as up to date as others. When flexing the latest layout technologies or other functionalities, your website should still at least be usable in Safari.
I hope the batteries are in parallel instead of in series because there’s a chance the batteries still with capacity might to to charge the dead ones.
That is a great concept, mostly if the user is also notified that something is degraded so they can use it, but repair it when they have the opportunity.
This does not apply to this flashlight. Working on multiple battery types is not graceful degredation as batteries do not degrade into less batteries and a AA does not degrade into a AAA. Cell packs can become slightly unbalanced or by user error you can put 2 dead batteries with 2 good batteries, but then they will discharge into each other anyway and really cut the lifespan.
Pretty cool feature and handy if you run out of batteries during an emergency, but I don’t think it fits the definition lol
Cell packs can become slightly unbalanced or by user error you can put 2 dead batteries with 2 good batteries, but then they will discharge into each other anyway and really cut the lifespan
One interpretation could be that each battery powers a separate LED, and thus they aren’t connected and if a battery goes dead that LED just goes unpowered.
So aside from the mechanism, it also potentially means redundancy and higher cost (more parts). I’d say maybe the LEDs ran by AAA might last longer (same LED configured to run lower so the battery lasts longer), but LEDs themselves probably aren’t the thing burning out in most cases.
As a bonus it’d mean that it’d be easier to know when your batteries are low (especially if high-and-low placements meant batteries go dead one-by-one rather than all-at-once), a problem for me as I keep using my flashlight until it’s super dim (somewhat because it’s fine, somewhat because I don’t notice). Though I guess that could be an issue too, I know the battery charger I have charges batteries in pairs.
That last part said, it might be better to use the AAA batteries as backup (or maybe extra light in a high-power mode) instead.
Assuming this is a led flashlight there has to be step up in the circuit for it to work with a single 1.5V battery. Then there could be 4 individual leds, each powered by one battery.
