Gummy Bear Vites

There are 55 more Bears in this bottle!!!

Pancake Blaster

Great idea but feels very wasteful to end up with an empt aerosol can that is not easy to recycle.
Especially since not much batter can fit in a can.

Please think of the full cycle of the product, manufacturers.

DIY Light Switch Labels

Been wanting to do this to our new house as I still haven't gotten the light switches memorized. Johnny happened to have some sticker labels and voila! Johnny insisted we tape over them to protect them; I on the other hand am ok if they get old and dirty; that will give me another oppotunity to think on them and see what better labels I can come up with for the next round ... :)

ceiling fan & light using a UFO metaphor

aahh, the trouble maker power plug switch in the living room ...

Korean Spice

The team was having lunch. A joke comes out just as I put kimchi in my mouth. The spice went up my nose while we all laugh hysterically. Sigh the dangers in working for a Korean company 

Closet Sound Barrier

I never understood the floor plans of a narrow, windowless closet in between the bathroom and the bedroom.
However, since we moved to our new house, I suddenly understood the genius of the closet as the sound barrier between the bathroom and the bedroom!
Our current bathroom layout opens right into the bedroom so that if one spouse needs to wake up earlier than the other and get ready for work, the flowing water, hair dryer wakes up the spouse still in bed:

So, instead of just another narrow closet in between the bathroom and bedroom floor plan, I thought I might as well try a redesign with my preferred typical Japanese bathtub + shower layout -- a 'water proofed' room housing both the shower & bath tub side by side so once one's cleanly rinsed via the shower, he can jump right in and soak in the steamy bathtub.
This particular layout tries to retain a similar dimension as the current layout:

We could even insert one of those tiny sinks in the water closet. The flaw with this layout though is the toilet's placement right next to the closet which may seem disconcerting ... This layout also moves the closet sound barrier from the next door bedroom.
In spite of the downside however, note the penetrating skylight in the sound barrier corridor!

Extended handles on cleaning brushes

Lately, I've come to appreciate the extended handle designs on cleaning brushes.

My hands get all wet and soapy from a quick clean up when I'm in direct contact with the brush/sponge, I'm too lazy to wear clumsy gloves; extended handle brushes are now my favorite 'user friendly', ergonomic, multi-angle-versatile household tool!

Not a drain - affordance design

At the Microsoft kitchens, we have these water machines with the typical 'this is not a drain' - do not pour water into the slush tray:

 

The design of this specific water machine simply has the design affordance for one to think they are hooked up to the water pipes and hence that slush tray, one would think, would work like a sink drain.

Note that the water machines are even inset into the kitchen counter for me to assume that it's hooked up to the water out pipe.

And so I daydream, if only the machine had a visible bottom where one can obviously see that there is no drain in the slush tray (aided by a lighter interior, perhaps even white to psychologically make people afraid about dirtying the nice white interior!). And I suppose the water-in pipe will just have to invisibly be hooked from the back or bottom, ideally at the top of the machine so again users would assume the mental model that it's the in-pipe and not the out-pipe...

Of course ideally, the water machines should be hooked with an out-pipe if not for the extra cost ...