the thing you keep losing and rebuying
there's an object i've bought four times. same object. i keep losing it and buying it again. i'm not going to tell you what it is because it's embarrassing. but i've thought about why this keeps happening and i think it says something.
the object is small. that's part of it. small things migrate. they end up in pockets, in bags, in the wrong drawer. you don't notice they're gone until you need them. by then you've already ordered a replacement.
what the pattern means
i've started paying attention to the things i rebuy. not the consumables — soap, coffee, whatever. the objects. the things that are supposed to be permanent but keep disappearing. there's a pattern in what they have in common.
they're all things i use but don't store. they don't have a place. they live wherever i last used them, which means they live everywhere and nowhere. the calitoywares blog has been thinking about this — the relationship between an object and its place in a space. things without homes get lost.
the solution isn't to buy a better version of the thing. it's to give the thing a home. obvious in retrospect. i've bought the same object four times before figuring this out.
the design angle
there's a design question buried in here. why do some objects naturally find homes and others don't? i think it's about whether the object communicates where it belongs. a key has a hook. a book has a shelf. a small tool with no obvious storage solution ends up in the junk drawer or the pocket or the void.
good design solves this. the object tells you where to put it. or it comes with a place — a case, a stand, a clip. the objects i keep losing are the ones that don't come with a place and don't suggest one. openedterminal.com wrote something about this in a software context — the interface that doesn't tell you where things go. same problem, different medium.
i've started buying things with cases. even when i don't think i need the case. the case is the home. the home is the reason i don't buy the thing a fifth time.
if you're building something physical — girlnextup.com has been writing about the objects that actually stick in people's lives versus the ones that don't — the storage question is worth thinking about early. and xcalitoy.com has been covering how people actually use the things they buy, which is usually different from how you designed them to be used.