Pride in your work

I am often depressed by the throw-away nature of most design work today.  Of course, almost everything is driven by economics, and the quality of the thought that went into the design of a product is usually lost in its marketing.  So frequently the product itself is secondary to its context; the design driven by avoiding the competition's patents, its features chosen by a committee of suits, its useful lifecycle (never more than a year or so at maximum) decreed by the inexorable encroachment of knock-offs and the waning patience of retailers.

So today when I was waiting for the train at the Quincy stop in the loop, I was pleasantly surprised to see this old promotion:

What pride in your design!  The Daisy Oil Can, its patent date proudly displayed on the top rim of the product (not just the number, and not hidden like on most products today), is hailed as a miracle of innovation.  Miniature people surround it, gazing longingly at its laughably oversized brilliance.  As far as I can tell, it is a glass-lined tin can which presumably does not leak as much as conventional all-tin cans.  But the damn thing looks like it's here to stay; the inventors have no shame in their sliced-bread mentality.  It's too bad that small victories are no longer deemed worthy of such celebration.

To see how far we've fallen from those glory days of wondrous invention, check out this depressingly right-on spoof from The Onion (foul language is potentially NSFW).