Ever since it was created in 2016, the 'Awful Taste But Great Execution' subreddit has been steadily growing and gaining a strong foothold on the platform. Dozens of thousands of users always seem to be on the lookout for the strangest, tasteless, and most ridiculous products and designs to share with fellow members of the community. But while the concept of these objects may be tacky, there’s no denying that the creation is nothing but tactful.
Previously, the ATBGE moderator team was kind enough to tell us a bit more about their community. A representative of this online group explained that the page was created as a spin-off of another subreddit called 'S***ty Car Mods'. After the community rejected the posts suggested by ATBGE, the moderator decided to create a whole new subreddit for the cause. And they never looked back.
"In the beginning, /r/ATBGE focused heavily on automotive-related posts, but we knew doing this would potentially limit our user base. To make /r/ATBGE more appealing to the masses, we opened up the subreddit to include things beyond autos (tattoos, fashion, décor, etc.)," the moderator told Bored Panda, adding that this was the point when the community really started to grow.
"As we grew, moderators were added and subreddit rules were further refined," the representative of the group continued. "Now we are here and things are still looking good. We continue to add new subscribers each day, which is a good thing (considering we all do this for free)."
When we asked the moderator to show us their favorite post from the subreddit, they shared this creepy-looking coin purse. They added that the whole idea of their page is to essentially document all kinds of objects that "display quality craftsmanship in the least elegant way possible."
Living in this modern world, we humans have gotten used to well-thought-out things. From shopping online to wandering around crowded isles, we encounter heaps of products and constantly uncover original ideas that we haven’t seen before. We assume they will make our lives easier and solve problems we may not even realize we had before. After all, think of how many companies invested their time, effort, and resources to bring these objects into our lives.
But all it takes is one brief scroll past the ground-breaking innovative solutions for things to take an odd turn. Suddenly, you find a whole other world of bizarre and plain bad concepts that immediately bend your limits of imagination. As you probably already noticed while scrolling through this list, even the most creative ideas are sometimes unworthy of implementation.
But this begs the question: when it comes to design, what can we determine as a "good" idea and a "bad" one? According to a blog post on ProductPlan, the definition of product design is the process of imagining, creating, and iterating objects that solve users’ problems and address specific needs in a given market. "The key to successful product design is understanding the end-user customer, the person for whom the product is being created. Product designers attempt to solve real problems for real people by using empathy and knowledge of their prospective customers’ habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants," they explained.
"Ideally, a product's design execution is so flawless that no one notices; users can intuitively use the product as needed because product design understood their needs and anticipated their usage."
More often than not, however, coming up with innovative and decent solutions is far from an easy task. Even if you believe in your idea to your very core, you can’t predict what kind of results the end product will bring. But as Mike Doell, an industrial designer and president of the Toronto-based studio Ross + Doell Inc, told us in a previous interview, "bad" design is a relative term that often leads to never-ending conversations.
According to him, there are several explanations for why blunders occur in the product design world. "A few reasons are low budgets, inexperience, super tight deadlines, and risk intolerance. This often leads to copying a successful product without fully understanding it or the thought process involved," he explained to Bored Panda. Moreover, when designers leave out or alter features and details, it can "adversely affect the product if you don't fully understand what you are copying."
