User Centered

I was day dreaming as I stared at some long forgotten, as yet unidentified meat in my refrigerator...it would be nice as far as equal usage goes if we could have a magical First In, First Out (FIFO) queue.

This way, things don’t get over or under used. As it is, there is always that couple pieces of lunch meat (First In) that gets shoved to the back (Last Out) of the fridge to make way for the fresh new lunch meat. And why would you want to reach back there to get the old stuff when the nice new stuff is right in front of you?

Ok- stop being lazy you say. Fine- but how about Tupperware, plates and other dishes? How often to you just pull the one or two dishes off the top of the stack leaving the bottom ones untouched for years? I still haven’t touched the bottom of those “Smart Spins” that I bought.

Dixie cup holders/dispenser are neat. You drop them into the top, and pull from the bottom. FIFO. Beautiful. We need dixie cup holders for EVERYTHING in the kitchen. Plates, cups, milk and meat. I want a dixie cup dispenser for my lunch meat. Perfect! How ‘bout it science?

I guess I should try to add something actually useful to this post… how about this? Read Henry Petroski’s “Small Things Considered” to learn more about the evolution of the design of the dixie cup and dispenser. Here’s a quote from a Duke University article on the author-

...the paper cup, for example. Petroski says it was spawned early last century when people began to realize that the communal tin cup from which everyone -- healthy and sick alike -- drank at the public water barrel, well, pump or spigot often was the source of germs and disease. A group of Boston investors saw money to be made in making clean and disposable paper cups available at public water fountains. Their idea was a cup that would be dispensed in a flat, folded configuration that could be opened.

An inventor and entrepreneur named Lawrence W. Luellen was intrigued by the idea, but Petroski says Luellen thought the chances of success would be greatly enhanced if the cup were delivered round and fully formed. He eventually came up with a design that had a flange around the top edge of the cup to stiffen it, and make it easier to dispense one cup at a time from a stack of nested cups in a dispensing machine. Luellen and his partners later named the product the Dixie cup.

“Water drinkers of all ages now eschew public fountains, which stand idle in many a school hallway as students and teachers alike have become accustomed to carrying their own plastic bottles,” Petroski writes. “In fact, students and others generally have become so used to drinking water from a bottle that the public fountain may be in danger of becoming obsolete.”