How design that doesn’t fit fails — A case study of an infected tooth

When I got a tooth infection

In 2021, I got an infection around one of my premolar teeth on the upper jaw that started as a joke until it got severe. I reached a point when I couldn’t eat anything hot or take a cold drink. To save myself from this pain, I visited a dentist at a nearby hospital.

The dentist advised me that the tooth was heavily damaged and needed either extraction or disinfecting, trimming, and adding a crown. This left me afraid of the drills and gum injections, but I had no other option but to opt for the second option since I couldn’t imagine one of the teeth being extracted.

Getting an artificial tooth or crown

After three days of continuous disinfection, the dentist finally got me a crown that he inserted on top of the original tooth, but this time reshaped like a control tower to enable the crown to fit.

When I was leaving the hospital, the dentist told me that I shouldn’t hesitate to feel weird while eating since the crown wasn’t an actual tooth. I accepted and left the hospital.

Ever since then, the crown has felt weird inside my mouth, especially while I am eating.

Living with a weird feeling

I realized that whoever designs the crowns doesn’t match them to the actual surface of the tooth, especially the top surface, which is supposed to enable grinding food while eating. This mismatch leaves you with a crown with a nearly flat top away from the roughed top of the original tooth.

I can’t say I bought a cheap crown because I spent close to $200 to get it, and to my surprise, the doctor even told me to expect a bad feeling while using the crown. I have been contemplating this crown every time I brush in the morning, wondering if the designers considered how people who were going to use it would feel.

I wondered if the designers even considered the original feeling of using and having teeth before they were infected or removed. Once there is a deviation from what we already know while in contact with anything, we tend to have low negative feelings because that something will seem strange, if not harmful. The opposite is true.

This is where fitting products into people’s lives becomes a deterministic factor in how they will feel. Failure to find ways to fit the product into their lives will lead to continuous rejections due to negative feelings brought about by the mismatch between what they are used to and what they are experiencing.

Thanks for reading 👏