I stayed at a friend's apartment a few weeks ago. It is difficult to describe the decor, but if my grandmother and Master P were forced to collaboratively design an apartment, his place is what you might get.
Walls covered in paint made from melted silver, gold dragon faucet heads roaring out of the wet-bar sink, all trimmed with flower-print or toile curtains. That sort of thing.
The shower is, of course, also over-the-top; one of those awesome luxury showers with heads and nozzles jutting out every which-way from the granite walls. Sounds like great fun, but when it came time to actually use it, I was confronted with the following:
Not only did I fail to figure out how to control the temperature and which shower heads were active, but I couldn't even figure out how to turn the thing on and off! I was assaulted from all sides by water of all different temperatures during the minutes of fiddling it took for me to turn this stupid thing off.
I was horrified enough by this set of controls that I actually bothered to take this photo to document the insanity.
Yesterday I started reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and, to my delight, came upon the following diagram:
With the wonderful caption: "What do you do here? Why would anyone dream up this scheme?"
I am very much looking forward to reading this book.