Design has always walked a peculiar line between necessity and excess, basing itself on the notion that every problem wants a solution and every given solution must be elegantly design — even when the problem itself is, at best, debatable, and at worst, entirely fabricated. The result is an endless parade of products that solve nonexistent issues, wrapped in aesthetically pleasing packages that seem irresistible simply because they exist.
Our consciousness has the peculiar quirk of being convinced to desire something not because it fills a void, but because its very existence suggests a void not previously recognized. It’s a cognitive dissonance in the human psyche between actual need and manufactured desire that sits at the heart of useless product design. In other words, it’s a carefully crafted narrative that suggests our lives are somehow lacking without this particular solution.
Consider the banana slicer: someone, somewhere, decided that the ancient human practice of cutting bananas with a knife was insufficient. Maybe they were haunted by the thought of all those imperfectly sliced bananas and their varying thicknesses ruining breakfast tables across the globe. The solution? A plastic contraption designed to do exactly one thing, and do it marginally better than the already existing tool. It’s a design answer in search of a question.
But there is something mesmerizing about these useless products. Entire industries are built around making nothing seem like something. It’s a peculiar evolution of capitalism, where function becomes secondary to form, and the very act of design becomes a self-referential exercise in aesthetic justification.
This phenomenon speaks to man’s fundamental relationship with objects and their perceived value. Historical precedents exist, of course. The Victorian era was particularly fond of over-engineered trivial problems with contraptions like mustache guards on teacups and finger stretchers for aspiring pianists. The contemporary version, though, comes not from wide-eyed optimism but from design fetishism — consider the “smart” water bottle that tracks hydration and syncs with a smartphone: there is a presupposition that humanity, after millennia of drinking when thirsty, suddenly requires an app to prompt hydration. Here, design isn’t solving a problem but creating a need out of thin air.
This trend has been accelerated by platforms like Kickstarter and Product Hunt, where the mere semblance of innovation is often enough to generate support. A sleek rendering and polished video can convince thousands that they need a gadget for something they’ve managed perfectly well without.
The emperor’s new clothes are now available in brushed aluminium with Bluetooth.
Ironically, many of these products excel in design fundamentals. They boast clean lines, intuitive interfaces, sustainable materials, ethical production, gorgeous packaging. They tick every box of what a well-designed product should be, except for usefulness. However, this might be the point: in a world where basic needs are increasingly met (at least for the target market of these products), function becomes secondary to the emotional satisfaction of ownership, and there’s no longer purchase of these products to solve problems but to participate in a narrative about innovation and progress where the useless product becomes a token of belonging, a signal that there is a future to take part in — even if that future is unnecessarily complicated.
This isn’t necessarily a criticism, as there is something poetic in humanity’s dedication to crafting beautiful solutions to imagined problems. It speaks to creative spirit and desire to make things better, even when “better” is largely subjective. These useless products possibly serve a different kind of function — they’re conversation pieces, art objects, manifestations of the collective desire to continue innovating even when there are no actual meaningful problems to be solved.
The true art, then, lies not in designing these products but in selling them. It’s about crafting a narrative that elevates the unnecessary into the desirable; convincing people that their lives will be meaningfully improved by a device that does something they could do perfectly well without. It’s in the alchemy that turns the useless into the priceless. The most useless skill of all is, perhaps, in recognizing the absurdity of it all and admiring it nonetheless.
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