stimulant

I hope that this instructable is portentous:

The stock cupholder tray between the front seats of the Honda Odyssey is a well-known spill hazard. It is possible to modify the stock cupholders to make them less prone to spill. This instructable gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

Think about this: someone, dissatisfied with their Honda, wants to help other people who are also, inevitably, dissatisfied. They come up with a fix for their dissatisfaction. With whom do they share it? Instructables! Not Honda! That’s a stunning endorsement of the instructables community and a flagrant admission of disengagement from the technological establishment.

And this is not unique. Many of my daily thoughts begin with a complaint or note of potential improvement. Whenever I approach a door, I take note of the distribution of wear. If the paint or finish is worn away in a place other than the handle, you have concrete evidence friction between design and usage. Several months ago, while on the commuter rail, I noticed how poorly suited trains are for what many people use them: reading and sleeping. The impulse to tell a train designer what I wanted led to the vision of a company that makes public and advertises the physical design of its products. Even something as simple as being able to annotate images of products with suggestions would be fantastic. And if a company showed itself responsive to user input, and went out of its way to solicit input and capture it painlessly, you’d have the most sensitive (and well-targeted) industrial design team — or at least, quality assurance team — ever. Capturing customer input at the point of service is a thorny problem but an obviously fantastic investment.