Category Archives: Design

On July 7th 1936 (almost 75 years ago) Mr. Henry F Phillips received a patent for a type of screw and the accompanying screwdriver – the Phillips screw. The Phillips screw has been around for so long, and have been taken for granted for so long that I’ve never pondered about its birth – why did someone come up with a “+” shaped head to go along with the “-” shape. The only thing that went off in my mind was probably, “+” shape has four arms and somehow that makes it easier to turn and less likely to slip.

It was of course that, and more:

The Phillips-head screw and Phillips screwdriver were designed for power tools, especially power tools on assembly lines. The shallow, cruciform slot in the screw allows the tapering cruciform shape of the screwdriver to seat itself automatically when contact and rotation are achieved. That saves a second or two, and if you’ve got hundreds of screws in thousands of units (say, cars), you’re talking big time here.

And not only does a power Phillips driver get engaged fast, it stays engaged and doesn’t tend to slide out of the screw from centrifugal force. Another advantage: It’s hard to overscrew with a power tool. The screwdriver will likely just pop out when the screw is completely fastened.

Ah! That additional bit of engineering, design and thoughtfulness that almost everyone have taken for granted – and I suppose, that’s why it became such a popular fastener.

That said, consumer electronics do seem to increasingly treat screws with disdain – it is now seen more as a blot in the aesthetics, if you will. Could the screw ever one day disappear from manufactured products altogether?

[via WIRED]

Regular reader Scott asks:

We designers and innovators struggle all the time to get our name “out there” so we can more quickly push our designs into reality.  Entering (and winning) such contests as Muji can certainly help, but at what cost?

If you sit back and look at the bigger picture of what is happening, it is really quite sad.  Let’s say a huge company needs to develop a new fun dispenser for their soap product.  They can spend millions hiring a prestigious design firm to get a filtered short list of a few new ideas put together by a team of perhaps 5 designers, or they can sponsor a design competition – disguise their motive in the form of a “challenge” to the designers of the world.

As in most design competitions, it would not be surprising to see 5000 designers enter from around the world.  Each designer would carefully follow the rules, in many cases pay a FEE of up to perhaps $100 or so and then spend hours carefully and vividly illustrating their novel work, presenting it in the exact form required by the rules of the competition (and the sponsoring company).  They would then submit their invention, their design, their intellectual property to so-called “judges” who work with the sponsor to determine select winners.  During this process, the sponsoring company has the privilege of inspecting the outcome of perhaps the biggest brainstorm session in the world.

The cost to the company is minimal (pay the judges and award $10,000/ $5,000/$1,000 to the winners).  For this small cost, the company gets to see incredibly diverse and innovative concepts from great minds of many parts of the world (ideas that have not be shown before) AND they get the rights to the designs they want AND they don’t have to pay royalties or give the struggling designer any design credit to HIS or HER design, AND they also get free advertisement as a result of being the sponsoring company (it looks like great PR – a win win win for the company).

Are we fools here?  I’m surprised all companies don’t tap into this wealth of eager brains.  We need to form a union to protect our innovations from the corporate world.

If we don’t win, which is often the case, we don’t even get any constructive criticism from the judges for our fee.  So we don’t really learn from the experience (design wise) and honestly, we can’t be certain that the judges even looked at our designs.  We often don’t even get a courtesy email to let us know that we didn’t make the next round.  I wish there was a better way.

What are your thoughts?