design

Neil Cicierega's parody song 'Redesign Your Logo', played over a live backing video with corporate PowerPoint visuals. It mocks the infamous Pepsi design strategy presentation.

A short clip of the Simpsons episode in which Homer designs a car with absurd requirements, used here as a lesson in project requirements and scope.

A 2006 parody made by a Microsoft team that shows how the company would redesign iPod packaging, with a box piled with feature claims, logos and clutter in contrast to Apple's clean design.

Slavoj Zizek speaks at an architecture congress in Pamplona about how toilet design in France, England and Germany reflects national ideology. The clip is about four minutes long.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

A short clip from The West Wing in which characters argue for the Gall-Peters map projection over Mercator. It dramatizes how standard maps distort the relative size of countries.

Brad Fitzpatrick records himself struggling to silence a set of first-generation Nest Protect smoke alarms that keep beeping and triggering one another.

The short printer-destruction-adjacent clip from Office Space built around the cryptic 'PC LOAD LETTER' error message. It pokes fun at unhelpful printer errors.

A short clip parodying Windows Vista's cancel-or-allow security prompts, in the style of Apple's Mac vs PC ads.

A short clip from the film Idiocracy showing a hospital reception computer where staff pick a condition from a board of simple pictorial buttons.

The business card scene from the film American Psycho, in which characters compare their business cards.

An SNL sketch in which Ryan Gosling's character is obsessed with the font choice (Papyrus) in the movie Avatar's title. It is a comedy bit about a widely mocked typeface.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

Top Gear episode in which Jeremy Clarkson and team try to destroy a Toyota Hilux pickup through water, fire, and a demolished building. It is the first part of the 'Killing a Toyota' series.

In Top Gear's second part, racing driver Sabine Schmitz tries to lap the Nurburgring in a Ford Transit van in under ten minutes. She finishes just over the mark.

David Mitchell's Soapbox rant on employers who demand passion and enthusiasm from workers, using satire to skewer fake workplace passion.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment claiming that jaywalking became a crime through campaigns by the auto industry. It is a short, comedic history of how streets were reclaimed for cars.

In this Top Gear segment Jeremy Clarkson tries to roll a Reliant Robin three-wheeler through Barnsley, with celebrity helpers trying to keep it upright. The car keeps tipping over.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

Simone Giertz presents Truckla, a homemade pickup truck conversion of a Tesla Model 3, shown in a short humorous promo.

A four-minute Adam Ruins Everything segment on why employers discourage workers from sharing salaries. It argues that discussing pay with coworkers is legal and helps workers.

A one-minute Grand Tour clip in which James May explains what happens if you drive a car in Germany without a licence.

A comedy sketch of a business meeting in which an engineer, the expert, is asked to do impossible things like draw red lines with blue ink.

Top Gear segment in which Richard Hammond drives a Renault R25 Formula 1 car around Silverstone for two laps. He struggles with the car's demands.

Google Netherlands' April Fools' 2016 video presents a fictional self-driving bicycle for Amsterdam, framed as a serious product launch.

The Monorail song scene from The Simpsons, uploaded with a note comparing it to a local Australian development controversy.

Casey Neistat's early viral short in which he gets ticketed for not using a bike lane in New York, then shows how often the lanes are blocked by cars and other obstacles. It runs about three minutes.

Top Gear segment in which Hammond and May try to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle. Launching is easy, but landing it safely is the problem.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A short clip of a Garry Kasparov press conference interrupted by a flying object in a prank. It is a brief, crude stunt video.

A one-minute clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which characters trade technobabble about RISC architecture changing everything.

A three-minute clip from The Wire season 3 in which Stringer Bell chairs a drug-crew business meeting using Robert's Rules of Order. The scene plays the formal procedure against the criminal setting.

A roughly ten-minute scene from the movie The Pentagon Wars showing how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's requirements ballooned through committee demands into a compromised design. It is a satirical dramatization of military procurement.

A satirical Onion News Network piece announcing the 'MacBook Wheel', a laptop with no keyboard where users type by spinning and clicking a wheel. It parodies Apple product launches and minimalist design.

A five-minute clip of a George Carlin routine arguing that the education system is designed to produce compliant citizens rather than critical thinkers. It ties schooling to the interests of the people who own the country.

A Saturday Night Live sketch for the Amazon Echo Silver, a smart speaker for the elderly, in which older users misunderstand Alexa. It parodies voice assistants.