My heating system suffers primarily from issues of visibility. In the pictures, you can see the housing unit that covers my heater, and hopefully you can see the knob that controls the temperature through the metal grate (I did not want to remove the housing just for the picture). The biggest issue is that the knob to control the temperature is not visible without removing the housing unit, which is problematic seeing as the housing unit is also one of the few counter spaces that came with the apartment, and there's always bound to be something that's stored on top of the heater.
I could also make the case that the system is inefficient and unsafe. The knob doesn't provide a clear mapping of knob position to heat intensity, and the only way to judge how high the heater is turned on is by guessing how close to "fully on" or "fully off" the knob is. Thus, the system is unsafe in a couple ways:
Putting the temperature control knob in an accessible location outside of the housing unit would be a great start to fixing the problem. I don't think the temperature precision could be solved without modifying the knob-controlled heating system.
My shower drain guard is designed to catch hair and other debris that would otherwise clog my shower drain. However, I find that the guard itself gets clogged, meaning that I have to clean it out. This wouldn't be such an issue if the guard weren't so difficult to clean out, and this difficulty often leads to the guard never being fully clean. In the end, the guard gets clogged so often and my frequent effords to clean it are always so futile that I resort to taking the guard out entirely, which completely defeats the purpose of having the guard in the first place. This is a huge lack of efficiency.
Learnability is not too much of an issue here, as the object has pretty much one function. Safety is also not a huge concern, outside of maybe germs that live inside the guard. I always wash my hands after cleaning the guard.
A nicer quality shower drain such as the Tub Shroom would solve my problem — its design supposedly captures the hair and debris seperately from the drain guard, allowing the hair to be easily removed while water can still drain properly.
My ceiling fan has two dangling pull switches: one to control the lights, and one to control the fan. This mechanism is totally fine for the light switch, as it is very obvious if the light is on or off. However, the design causes my ceiling fan suffers from poor safety and efficiency. The safety is not poor in the sense of there being imminent danger, but it does invite frequent errors that are not always easily recoverable. The fan has four settings: high, medium, low, and off. However, beyond hearing and feeling the relative noise and vibration levels of the motor, there is absolutely no way to tell what setting the fan is on at any given time, unless it's off. Practically speaking, this means that if I want to turn the fan off, I have to guess what intensity setting the fan is on, and perform the proper number of pulls. Since the motor noise and vibration are quite similar for both the high/medium and low/off settings, I will constantly mispredict the fan setting that is currently engaged, which causes me to mispredict the number of pulls needed to turn it off. This means that I have to cycle all the way back around the intensity settings to turn the fan off, and if I ever miscount or accidentally pull one too many times, I'll have to do it again until I get it right. The frequency of error makes the fan highly inefficient, as a mechanism that should require at most 3 pulls to turn off, can occasionally take 2-3 times that amount. In technical terms, the single control (the pulley) is mapped to 4 different functions, corresponding to the 4 different fan intensities. This makes for a poor conceptual model, since whenever the fan is on, I have a hard time predicting what state the fan is in and how many times to pull the switch to get it to the setting I'm after.
While aesthetically unpleasing, and potentially inacessible for shorter individuals, a design that fixes these issues would be a lever that can set the motor speed at continuous speeds ranging from high to off. It would be much easier to tell what speed the fan is at, while making it impossible to make a mistake when trying to turn the fan off.
