Point 1: I can tell you how something HASN'T impacted my learning -- I just wrote up a post for this on the WiKi interface earlier and lost the whole thing due to a misplaced keystroke and yet I'm still using the WiKi to compose my repost instead of copy-pasting.
Location: Sears Outlet Store Subject: Appliances Space Features: Variety Constrained Along a Single Dimension
The other day I was out fridge shopping at the Sears Outlet store with two friends. They were buying a refridgerator because their current one didn't close all the way or something. I'm vague on the details: the point is they wanted a new fridge.
If you've never been to the Sears Outlet, it's a place where they offload products that have been returned or are otherwise need to be gotten rid of. I noticed when we walked in the door that they carried a number of different varieties of products that you could count on your fingers: fridges, televisions, washers, dryers, washer/driers, one microwave, and lawnmowers are the ones I recall seeing at first.
When it came time to pay, while one friend was paying, the other and I were looking at the items near the register. In particular we were looking at these large metal square jobbies with drawers in them. Turns out that they were for the laundry room. You put them under the washer (or dryer or washer-dryer?) and you have an extra drawer.
This was all well and good until my friend started monkeying around with what he thought was the drawer on one of these things. Only it wasn't a drawer, it was a false front. It came right off revealing a space inside. Briefly we wondered what you would put in here that you would only want to remove the false front to get to. We wondered that, until I saw the third example.
This was similar to the other models. It was square, it was metal, it was hollow. Only this one had no drawer. In fact, it had no bottom either. It was almost impossible to use this to store anything: you would need to remove the appliance on top of it.
It was then that I realized that the original purpose of this class of device was simple to change the height of the appliance, probably for easy access. I learned about a class of product I had no idea about previously simple because it stood out among such a homogenous crowd of familiar objects, and had sufficient variety represented that I could see the common threads.
I still, however, wonder what exactly the door on that one fridge meant...