On Being Asked To Help
When asked to help, shutting down the extra noise and being there and helping is very difficult. Unfortunately, sometimes it is needed, and it will come across as intrusive, pushy or simply fully of it.
Recently, my wife asked me to help putting something together. It wasn’t coming together and she felt that it might be broken. I came over to help, and although they were relatively simple collapsible baskets there was a lot of design intent that was in play.
On the surface, it’s a plastic collapsible box. As I sat down to help there were a whole pile of concerns that jumped to mind that helped understand how it should go together.
- Elasticity of Plastic The type of plastic (no idea really) that your typical collapsible box is built from has a level of give, it allows locking mechanisms to connect. It means there is enough wiggle room to force things, but also enough rigidity to prevent it slipping out.
- Design ascethics The patterns on the inside and the outside match, that tells us that the way that the box would come together
- Ease of manufacture In general, it’s needs to be easy to put together on a factory line. It means it should be cheap to build (injection molding), and it should be also cheap to construct (simple mechanical steps that are either robot automatable, or low cost labor automatable).
- Constructed Rigidity It’s a container for holding stuff, once built it needs to not collapse. There will be either physcial rigidity from the shape, or there will be rigity through locking tiems together
- Mechanics of Use It’s a collapsible box that more or less should be lifted up and magically it’s 90% complete. Lift up, push, done. This implies that there will be gravity as a main force putting it together to pull up with a little bit of physical force to lock.
As I approached to help the first part was the main consideration. It should fit together based on the visual clues. (Elasticity of Plastic) That didn’t work, there were a large amount of little clips, guides and so on. It was a mess trying to collapse these while standing up. I was missing something.
Next I noticed that the outside of the collapsble parts didn’t match the ends I was trying to install. So turn them around. They still didn’t come together. There were locking mechanisms, protuberences, etc that meant it wasn’t going to work easily.
When I stopped, and let the pieces begin to come together, it became easy. very easy. The sides are always connected. They’ll just push in. The handles need to be connected up at the top, since you lift and go - letting gravity do the work. You need a little push to lock it in.
Once I’d let those thoughts come in, it became easy. Attach sides, collapse, slide the ends in within the gap. Lift up, lock. Done. Maybe 30 seconds. It’s that whole list above collapsed into 8 pieces of plastic.
As I was working through the first stages, my wife got up and walked away. “I’m not helping here”. Did I push her out? How could I have worked with her better? Was I being a dick? Should I have explained asked her to take a step back? Or should I have explained my reasoning?
To be honest, I’m not sure what I could have done to make it not result in her walking away. It was either
- To fiddly for two people to work on at the same time - I was there and had my hands in there and I had “pushed her out”.
- To prescriptive on what to do without communicating - I’m telling her what to do
- To descriptive in how it would come together - I don’t think she’d want me rationalizing out loud about the design ascethics, the mechanics and the design for manufacturability. She just wants the box put back together.
Lost again. Thanks brain…