Rants of a Product Designer
I despise whatever conniving Marketing genius at Procter & Gamble decided that Dawn Direct Foam would be the next big advancement in dishwashing technology. Remember in recent past when all the liquid dish soap brands started advertising their products as "concentrated" (with little obvious change to the soap itself...just smaller bottle size)? Now it seems they've actually gone the other way, diluting the soap with water so that it can be turned to fluffy foam before it touches your sponge. And they put such a spin on it, it disgusts me.
Of course, the idea of a foam-dispensing pump is not all that bad. I appreciate the neat hand soap that comes from such an invention. For this, we thank the engineers. But I do not appreciate the bright bulbs in Engineering who designed Dawn's blasted pump, the spring of which cannot overpower the pump's internal friction. What do I mean by this? Well, you push the pump down to dispense foam onto your sponge. And then the pump just sits there. Stuck at the bottom. You literally have to pull it back up in order to depress the pump a second time. And you need to depress it that second time, and five more times after that, because each pump action yields about enough foam to clean one tine on a fork. This is hardly product improvement, if you ask me.
This irritates me to no end at work, where all we have in our kitchenette is this Direct Foam crap. I've seriously contemplated calling up the P&G consumer hotline just to complain, but then I remember that I also contribute to the design of a product, the end-user experience of which often leaves something to be desired. Whoops. And so I'll just shut up and appreciate the choice of colors that Dawn used for their Lime Surge variety of Direct Foam. There, I said something nice.
