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Some design students have weird ideas about what ergonomic design is and how the human body works.
As a student, I was stuck in a group project with a guy who insisted that it would be more comfortable to carry a heavy shopping bag like the figure on the left than the figure on the right because "You can use more of your arm muscles."
He finally changed his mind when I made him try it.
The same guy insisted that handrails on stairs were at the same height relative to the user whether they were going up the stairs or down them until, again, I took him to a staircase and made him try it.
Granted this one is a little less intuitive but, I mean...
This same guy designed a wooden rack to be used in an oven while cooking food. When the instructors asked him the obvious question: "How do you expect to keep this wooden stand from burning?" his answer was "Some kind of super paint?"
"As long as it's plausible (i.e. no super paint)." has become my baseline for hypothetical designs in the classes that I teach.
My absolute favourite design this guy came up with was for a furniture class where we were given a limited amount of plywood, hinges, and caster wheels and he came up with the world's deadliest mode of transportation.
You were supposed to "steer" by setting one of the side flaps down which he hypothesized would make it arc in that direction.
