Look, I love a good social-engineering-meets-marketing yarn as much as the next guy. General Mills makes you add your own egg to Betty Crocker cake mix so it feels like real cooking. Brilliant. Sells way better than ones with powdered egg already in the mix, even though the results are the same. Bravo. Figuring out subtle ways to bend people to your will is something I can definitely get behind.* Except in one case.

Because social engineering is the only reason I can think of for why every smoke detector on the market is so Grade-A God-Awful awful to look at. It can’t be a technological limitation, can it? Can smoke only be detected by off-white, round plastic pucks? Is it something specific about a rectangle or pastel colours that renders smoke undetectable?

That seems unlikely, so I suspect it’s an attempt at social engineering. Someone’s worried that people won’t take a detector that matches their crown moulding very seriously. Or remember to check its batteries regularly. Or maybe even notice it’s installed. That only something as stylish as a Renuzit air freshener can command the respect a smoke detector deserves.

Would a Martha Stewart-designed First Alert not be way more likely to get installed in multiple useful, highly visible places, like front halls, instead of banished to a single, less useful, less visible one, like a back staircase. Would it not fly off the shelves?

Would it not land me a fat payout?

*If you’re interested in other, similar tales, Terry O’Reilly’s excellent CBC Radio show, “The Age Of Persuasion” ran an episode earlier this season on just this subject. Do I mention this in order to suck up to Mr. O’Reilly, one of the titans of my profession? You bet I do. Sixteen ideas so far and none of you mooches have made me rich.

Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearinghouse of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.