Who opens the packet

A phone charger from an electronics shop in Fujairah comes sealed inside a hard plastic shell.

It cannot be opened by hand. It cannot be opened with keys. It needs proper scissors, and even then the edge it leaves behind is sharp enough to cut a thumb. The charger inside weighs less than the packaging around it, and the packaging goes straight into the bin.

Nobody set out to annoy the person holding it. The questions that make design good are simple ones: who is this for, and what is it for? Answer them honestly and most decisions follow. If it is for someone at home who wants to plug in their phone, the shell fails at almost everything.

But the shell was not designed for that person. It was designed for a buyer at a warehouse who wanted something that would not be stolen off a hook, a transport manager who wanted it to stack, a supplier who wanted to sell a lot of them cheaply. Each of those people had a reasonable request. Each of them was a "who" with a vote.

This is what happens in complicated systems. The person who uses the thing is rarely the person who chose it, and the person who chose it is answering to someone else again. By the time it reaches a kitchen table, the end user has the least say of anyone in the chain.

Multiply one small decision by a million shelves and you get a million sore thumbs and a mountain of plastic.

None of it is malice. It is just a system that forgot to ask who it was for.