If It's Not Broken - Don't Fix It!

CEBU, Philippines - Engineers, designers and repairmen are no strangers to axioms, particularly those that touch up on designing, redesigning or fixing things.

From "90% of computer problems can be found in between the chair and the keyboard" to "If all you have is a hammer, then hammering is your only course of action for anything," the saying "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" reigns supreme in the engineer's, designer's and repairman's rolodex of wise words to live by.

Going along with the wisdom in "If it isn't broken, don't fix it," following are quick takes on two items whose designs are widely acknowledged to have already reached their peaks - where redesigns may afford users with ease-of-use points, but won't really affect the basic functions the items were originally conceptualized and made for.

The Compound Lever Nail Clipper

Popularly known as "nail cutter," the compound lever nail clipper stands to be the poster boy for the nail trimming class of personal grooming implements.

Found and used in countless households in different parts of the globe, it is one of the two commonly encountered types of nail grooming tools - the pliers type being the other.

While the inventor of the nail clipper is not exactly known, patents for finger-nail clipping tools are known to have been around since the mid 1870s - with one filed by one Valentine Fogerty of the United States pointing to the "improvement" of a finger-nail clipping tool; alluding to the fact that such a device was already in circulation at the time.

In terms of its overall design, the compound lever style nail clipper has seen different design variations in a concave or convex-shaped head among others, but its basic lever-and-fulcrum-based form remains to be the same through the years.

The Scissors

As one of the world's most useful and oldest hand-operated shearing and cutting tools, a trusty pair of scissors is considered to be a basic must-have instrument in homes, offices and anywhere else in between.

With its current design characterized by a pair of metal blades pivoted to accommodate cutting, historians share that the earliest version of the scissors (the "spring type" scissors) dates back to around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia, with the direct ancestor of the modern scissors (the "pivoted scissors") believed to have been made by the Romans in 100 AD.

As a hand-operated shearing and cutting tool, scissors come in different shapes and sizes, apart from being designed for specific cutting purposes; like scissors specifically designed to cut hair, bits of meat and other food products, sheet metal or wire.

Though there are all sorts of size and form-factor variations of scissors, its pivot-based design remains to be a standard design convention. (FREEMAN)