This weekend I had to purchase and set a mousetrap in my garage. The mouse and I had an encounter one morning last week when I was getting the newspapers. My cleaning person had told me there was a mouse in the garage, but I'd not acted. So I went to buy a mousetrap, having gotten advice from my primary knitter who has much more experience with things like that than I do. What struck me is how terrible the instructions were. In fact, I didn't set the first trap correctly and it was only when my spouse became interested that we realized that the way I had done it was just providing easy food. So we got the trap set properly, but really, not because the instructions were any help. This dovetailed into my thinking about product development, a subject I teach. If one of the tenants of PD is that any product can be improved, why is that crazy old-fashioned mousetrap (maybe the bad instructions are the improvement?) still the most effective means of mouse demise? Then, I started thinking about knitting instructions. You can see where I'm going here.
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