In the greater scheme of things, nearly all design problems are trivial problems. When a designer does a bad job, we compensate with workarounds. The more mediocre the job, the more creative the workaround.

I broke one of my rules. I stayed at an Ibis hotel. The wound was self-inflicted. In my defence, it was an Ibis in Singapore. So things weren’t as bad as they would have been had it been an Ibis in the UK, or – worse – France. In practical terms, an Ibis in Singapore means, a) the mattress is slightly more than 2” thick, and b) there’s something that resembles an actual bathroom rather than the all-in-one, claustrophobia-inducing, seasickness-inducing, artificial-plastic ‘pods’ that we get in Europe.

All was going swimmingly well until I stepped into the actual shower with it’s actual tile wall. Very thoughtfully, there was a bottle of shampoo and a separate bottle of body-wash. This is what they looked like:

Can you spot the flaw?

Admittedly, it’s a fairly subtle one, at least as far as the designer – I assume someone drew it at some point – and the installer were concerned. I think their primary motivation was aesthetic elegance. No, I think it was their only motivation. Neither person was ever likely to have to make use of the finished product. You’d have to be stood in the actual shower to do that.

The body wash on the right turns out to be the main problem. Squeeze it with your right hand in order to dispense soap into your left hand and everything works swimmingly. Try and squeeze it with your left hand to dispense soap into your right hand, however, and things get somewhat trickier. Mainly because there isn’t enough space between the bottles to fit your fingers.

Okay, I know it’s not a big problem. If I’d packed my lump-hammer, for example, it would’ve been easy to solve: club the bottle holders off the wall and phone down to reception for a bar of soap. Like in the good old days.

TRIZ is a great asset when it comes to solution ideas for problems like this. And I haven’t even started to think about Inventive Principles 24 or 25 yet. Or, for that matter, whatever the Principle is that tracks down the design schools that graduated the Ibis designers and remind them that just because they deal in trivia doesn’t excuse their inflicting never-worked-in-the-real-world incompetence on students. Design-Thinking my arse. Maybe that’s Principle 41?

Or maybe this is all about Ibis corporate philosophy: we’re cheap so people expect – nay, need – half-baked design. Maybe they’re just upholding brand value?