the home of bad policy and bad design. Here’s where silly, irritating ideas public policy and products get shamed, and where stuff that strikes you as well-designed gets a Hurrah.

Harrumpf is the creation of Tom Forrester-Paton, a reasonably old, reasonably grumpy Australian, with typical shortcomings for his age – dodgy eyes, hearing not what it used to be, a bit of osteo-arthritis, you know the story. In addition, Tom is a hemiplegic, having lost the use of his left arm to polio as a young man.

We like our stuff to look good, but above all we want it to work well. If it comes to a contest between beauty and function, we’re going to pick function every time, because we believe that function and ergonomic excellence have a beauty all of their own.

When it comes to public policy, we expect government interventions in our lives to be grounded in evidence. We accept that experimental initiative is sometimes necessary to gather that evidence, but when the evidence shows the policy to be ineffective or, worse, counterproductive we expect it to be abandoned.