disclaimer: if I say 'industrial designer' or 'product designer', I'm referring to the people (like me) who design physical objects for use in real life situations. Consumer products, from chairs to doorhandles to pretty much any object humans can interact with.
I've always had a love for things that show their age and their use. Wear marks usually mark the route of the least resistance; it's like visual statistics on what the users tend to do in most cases. Think of this like elephant paths, or stairs on a monumental church worn down over centuries of people passing over them.
Clearly that particular path has preference, as everyone takes that path instead of other paths.
Sometimes these also show a little bit of hidden information about the use of objects, where intended functionality is bypassed in favor of shortcuts that cause wear and tear in places where the designer didn't expect it.
If designers consider these shortcuts in their design and add functionality or safeguards to either prevent it from happening or to allow it to happen but smooth the experience, that's good design imo.
You know the designers went through many testing rounds, found obscure problems like "lid damaged when users try to close the lid with the reservoir handle still up".
So they added a lil plastic sharktooth shape on the inside of the lid that pushes the handle out of the way so the lid of the coffee machine can close, regardless of the position of the water reservoir handle. (that's what you see in the gif!)
That's really not something you can get right on the first design iteration.
For the end user, there's no problems at all: they simply close the lid, and carry on doing whatever they were doing. A shortcut by design.
In short, we know people make mistakes, and there's not really any way to prevent all mistakes. Instead of punishing the user for minor errors, you can also streamline the usage route in such a way that the user doesn't even notice they just took a shortcut. It's as if the problem doesn't even exist anymore.
It's the little things like that that distinguish between decent and good industrial design.
