A Simple Fork

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

This could appear to be a weird choice, but I hope the reader will hear me out. I have a bit of a story that made me settle on this being an example of good design. The recent lecture about what makes good design reminded me of one of the first assemblies I had in high school. A teacher brought in a big, attractive and modern looking piece of kitchen equipment. It was supposed to be a juicer, but he couldn't work out how to use it. In the end he went to a shop and bought a small wooden juicer tool for £2 and it worked fine. He was teaching us a lesson about good design. I was then wondering why I didn't have a juicer in my kitchen. I am a complete sucker for ordering kitchen utensils, but I do try to reign in my purchases and think to myself whether it actually has a practical use before I buy it (because space in my kitchen is sparse). Then I realised the reason why, it is because when I juice a lemon I use a fork. I cut a lemon in half, push a fork in the open flesh and squeeze the lemon around the fork, it does the exact same thing a “simple” juicer does, it is probably messy for some, but for my needs this works well.

I don't want to sound like a Beatle, but when I was thinking about the Fork I was whisking some eggs to make myself some scrambled eggs, and I realised I have a useless gadget that my partner's parents bought me for Christmas. It stays in the cutlery drawer because I never use it. It is a small whisk that you push down on to “whisk you eggs” I think I have used it once, it was fiddly and it made a mess. The fork is perfect, it is the perfect size to hold at an angle across a bowl and it whisks the eggs perfectly in seconds. Plus it fits neatly in my cutlery tray in my dishwasher, and I have loads of them in case I want to make eggs again later in the day (I do eat a lot of scrambled eggs).