Annoying design – headphones with blue flashing LEDs

Have you noticed how some products seem to be deliberately designed to annoy the people around the user?

On a long distance flight recently, the person who sat next to me had a pair of headphones which featured elaborately designed motifs on the ear pieces; motifs which were backlit with super bright blue LEDs that flashed piercingly every second or so.

Imagine trying to ignore a bright blue flashing light mere centimetres from your peripheral vision!

What idiot designer would do this? Talk about use-context failure on a massive scale. Design cannot happen in a vacuum without awareness of its context. Like this, and this.

I wish I had taken pictures. But that would be rude…

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