Category Archives: Industrial Design

One of industrial design’s most influential and prominent figure in terms of ecological design and social responsibility would be the late Victor Papanek. When he graduated and stepped into the design profession, he was disappointed to learn that a very major chunk of product design are mere surface styling aimed squarely to spur sales and consumption, leading to him opining that industrial design is probably the second phoniest job in the world for creating things that people didn’t need (advertising would be the phoniest, since they persuade people to want these in the first place).

Indeed, as I graduated and joined the profession myself, this nagging question would surface every now-and-then. Sometimes we would be required to create designs for products that I’d personally see as frivolous and gimmicky – they are not innovative and adds little value to life, and exist primarily only because the market “demands” it. While these products may be justified if you look at profits-and-costs, sometimes it’s rather perplexing to imagine the amount of human and natural resources – months of manhours from design to production to marketing, raw materials in the plastic and metal parts, packaging, promotion, point-of-sale material, etc. – for just one product (likely amidst a whole line of similar products).

Of course, dough is what these projects give, and dough is what we need to put food on the table. But even as we take on these projects, I think it’s still extremely important for designers to realize the power they have in helping to reduce our footprint on the planet. For instance, it is not unimaginable for designers to be working on products that are planned to sell in the millions. If you think about it, every millimeter of material we specify translates to 1km of material in a 1-million-unit production. We are in a very privileged, and hence responsible position to reduce the ecological impact, perhaps much more than many other professions.

And often, they do not have to translate to sacrifices in product image or function. At times, they may even be enhancements, as some of these redesigned product packaging show (taken from NYTimes’ article):

Clockwise from top-left:
1) Coca-Cola 8-ounce bottle: A smaller and lighter bottle (while retaining the same capacity), resulting in reduction in materials used: savings on the material as well as transport costs.
2) Arrowhead Mineral Water bottle: Nestle redesigned the bottle and cap to make it lighter and more recyclable, while narrowing the label by half an inch. This result in a 30% reduction in plastics used (while featuring the extra recess as handle), and less paper for the label.
3) Big Mac packaging: This is a familiar one – The Styrofoam clam-shell burger packaging was switched to the current paper-based ones, making them biodegradable.
4) Crest Toothpaste: P&G introduced a standalone rigid tube for Crest toothpaste, so that there wouldn’t be a need for individual paper-based boxes that most toothpastes now still come in.

As you can see, sometimes subtle decisions we make as we’re designing can indeed have a great impact down the line. While we may not be a green activist, being conscious of these responsibilities would certainly go a long way to alleviating the toll that our Earth is bearing.

Is that a Lamborghini? Not quite. No, it isn’t one of the copycat cars either. If you’re sharp enough, you’d notice the Toyota badge on the front hood. So why is Toyota, a company known for its reliable, family-oriented cars doing with a high-end performance ride like this?

Turns out this is a concept vehicle called Volta (from a few years ago, I may add). The name would give it away – it’s a high-performance hybrid car that claims a 0-60mph in 4 seconds, even while achieving an economic fuel consumption of 435 miles for a 13.7 gallon tank (that’s 700km with about 50liter for us metric folks). What’s also intriguing is the internal layout (too bad they don’t have a picture of it):

The Giugiaro-designed carbon-fiber body seats three people abreast and features “drive-by-wire” controls, allowing you to position the steering wheel and pedals in front of any one of them.

So you can be a tree-hugger even with sportiness running through your blood! When this thing makes it to production, at least.

P/S: Toyota has been named by Business Week as the 3rd most innovative company in the world – just after Apple and Google. “Toyota’s dominance in hybrids has led to gas-electric cars for its Lexus brand and could bring the first plug-in electric hybrid within the next four years. The carmaker’s famous continuous improvement process—its own unsexy but effective approach to innovation—is being copied worldwide.”

Creative recently launched its newest kid on the block – the ZEN Stone, priced at just about half of the 2nd generation iPod shuffle. I haven’t seen the actual product, but from the photograph (albeit probably heavily enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® software), it doesn’t look too shabby. Of course, one look at it and one might scream “Shuffle Copy!”. Well that has some truth in it, though there simply aren’t too many permutations if you have the basic UI element with a rectangular IC board in it. Looks wise, I’d actually prefer this over the Shuffle, though this doesn’t clip (and comes with IMO awful color options).

What is much more interesting for me, though, is a comment that I came across over at the Engadget comments. One commenter remembered way back in 2005, when Sim Wong Hoo announced the declaration of war on Apple (Apple had then just launched the 1st generation iPod shuffle):

We’re expecting a good fight but they’re coming out with something that’s five generations older. It’s our first generation MuVo One product feature, without display, just have a (shuffle feature). We had that — that’s a four-year-old product. So I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people — it’s worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don’t have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it’s a non-starter to begin with. [Sim Wong Hoo, 11th Jan 2005]

Looks like he’s forced to eat his words.

From having to exchange the patent rights for “Made-for-iPod” branding rights, to launching the ZEN Stone following the success of Apple’s iPod shuffle, Creative has been forced to swallow humble pie time and again. Perhaps one of the lessons they can learn (and should have learned a long time ago), is that technological prowess is by no means the defining factor in consumer decisions and sales. The one who can best woo the customers in the field wins. And from the company’s performance in this market, it seems that they have either not learned the lesson, or are just unable to compete at the level required.

Perhaps as a result of the dismal returns that their $100million (budget for marketing head-on against Apple) has brought them, they have realigned their strategy of providing the cheaper and just-as-good me-too products. If you can’t fight them, well at least run along?

Current version is also available.

I stumbled across a rather old (dating all the way back to 2005), but still illuminating interview between Motorsportscenter.com and Aston Martin’s Design Director, Henrik Fisker. It’s three pages long, in which he talked quite extensively about the development process of the Aston Martin V8, as well as some other car-design topics, such as his personal favorites, goals and, well, cars in general.

“As soon as you curve a line, you lay that line over a surface, which is curving in another direction, and that line and that surface have to look good from any view when you walk around it. Once you’ve got that, that line will end somewhere, and then what you just designed at the back doesn’t line up with that now, and you have to redesign that to make it line up. There are all these aspects of the sculpture, the graphics, and the actual lines in the car. And then there are the overall proportions. There are so many things that have to come together. And that is why you can do a drawing that looks really good…you can’t turn a drawing around. You draw the perspective, which is one view – which you can make work, as a designer, it is your view – but what you don’t know is what happens when you turn this. That’s when you see it in the three dimensions.”

Anyone going “Ah! That’s exactly what I feel”?

The interview is in three parts: Part1, Part2, Part3

If you’re designing cell phones, this research presentation by Nokia’s anthropologist Jan Chipchase et al. may come in useful – statistics regarding how people carry their handphones across various cities on the globe are presented clearly and succintly.

Made me laugh – by James Piatt. He based it on Paris Hilton’s discarded pet Chihuahua. Piatt has them for sale here.

As computers proliferated, various speculations of how it would eventually be a mainstay in our lives were rife, and the notion that computer displays would eventually replace the traditional published materials like books, newspapers and magazines etc. were especially popular. Like the Sony Reader (first picture) above, flat, book-like gadgets of all shapes and sizes were prophesied or produced.

E-ink was a particular fore-runner in this sector. Their technology is illustrated above – millions of capsules houses even more subcapsules that are either white or black in color. When an electrical charge is applied, the black/white subcapsules would drift up or downwards accordingly to form the desired display. There are some advantages in this technology over conventional displays (like LCD) – they are much cheaper to produce, can be made very thin, requires very little power because it doesn’t need to have a backlight, can be read over a wide angle, and are high in contrast and crispness.

It does seem that the E-ink display may be getting closer to their founder’s goal of an electronic display to replace paper. However, that can be a very limiting thought – not because I am against e-papers, but rather, by constraining the perspectives to simply replacing paper, we might have missed many other opportunities where this technology can be applied – and with much beauty indeed!

Above are Seiko watches that uses the E-Ink technology in their watch displays. The one on the right won it the 2006 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève prize for electronic watches for the breakthrough application in watch displays. And in 2007, they are even more delightfully used – taking E-Ink’s display versatility to have a much more sensual and evocative display, away from the conventional look of the segmented LCD that have been pervasive in digital watches (for the productivity-mule among you, the watch also has a efficiency mode where information is indeed displayed more clearly and directly). I’m definitely impressed with their sensual and elegant application of the E-Ink technology, which has erased my impression of E-Ink being confined to cheap-looking, squarish and boring.

The MOTOFONE is another great example in E-Ink application. The MOTOFONE was developed to target at the developing regions like India and China. A few factors would become very important: they have to be (dirt) cheap to produce, be able to last long in between charges (electricity supply may be erratic; the user may be out-of-home for extended periods of travel without access to any power points; designing for it to be used in the outdoors and rural areas would require good contrasts while in the sunlight, as well as dust-proofing):

The most radical thing about the Motofone is the screen. It’s the first cellphone to make use of technology from E Ink, a maker of electronic ink. E Ink is literally like ink embedded in the screen, and each molecule switches between dark and light depending on how it is zapped with electrical charges.

Once the ink is electrified into a pattern — say, the time — it stays that way without using any more power, behaving like ink on paper.

The result serves two important purposes for the Indian market. First, the screen uses exceedingly less power than a typical illuminated cellphone screen. The Motofone has about 400 hours of standby battery time. Second, the screen is clearly visible in direct sunlight, again like ink on paper. This is a nifty feature when marketing to farmers and fishermen.

With E-Ink as the display, it can afford to have a MUCH lower consumption in battery power (the screen has always been the chief gobbler of cellphone battery juice). It does not need a backlight, and there is zero power consumption to maintain the display (power is only required to switch between the black/white states). This would mean that they can afford to give it a slimmer and lower-capacity batteries without affecting performance at all (does YOUR cellphone have a 12 days standby time?), which would definitely have a tremendous impact to the price point. It costs around $40 to produce, and I have seen it being retailed for around USD55 without any contracts with service providers.

So, think beyond the paper!

Some time ago, Shimano and IDEO collaborated to find out why bicycle sales dropped significantly in the US between 2000 and 2005, even though industry profits were on the rise due to sale of high-end bicycles marketed to the elites. It turned out that while technological advancements such as lighter and stiffer frames, multi-speed gear shifts, carbon fiber etc. excites the experts, they may not appeal to the average Joe (who likely doesn’t know what a dérailleur is, and does not want to find out either). While pursuing high-tech advancement in technology, the bike industry had somewhat neglected the emotional connection with the average users and the amateurs:

The Shimano/IDEO design team conducted observation-based research, revealing a series of factors that influence casual cyclists’ interest and participation: 1) A better riding experience – many adults miss the easy, joyful feel of riding a bike as a kid; 2) Product platform – a new feature set was needed, with automatic shifting and less visible mechanics; 3) The purchasing experience – independent bicycle dealers need to learn to engage with a new customer base that may include more women, amateurs, and inexperienced bikers.

Enter Trek Lime (as seen above). I thought the design was a very good job that fit the target market they were aiming at. The first look brings about a sense of nostalgia – it has a classical look/profile, not much different perhaps from what your aunt may have passed to you when you were a kid. At the same time, it retains a modern and fun image, looks absolutely easy and familiar, and yet it was given some new technological innovations and twists.

It features automatic gear shifting – not unlike those found in automatic-gear cars; the mechanical parts are all concealed within, giving a cleaner and easier-to-maintain look. The saddle doubles up as a storage compartment for your little nifties – for those small stuff you don’t want to hold while you ride, for example. The tires are puncture resistant; at the center of the tires there are little colored plastic parts – “Peelz” is their marketing name – that can be interchanged for different colors (and possibly graphics in the future).

I’m not sure how successful this would be in lifting their mass-market sales – I hope it does well, as I do really like the execution of this whole program from the research to the end-product. From the insightful research that led to the key observations and design goals (IDEO, Shimano); to the bicycle’s design execution (Trek) in assembling the necessary technological innovation and parts to meet the user’s desire, as well as the styling that in my opinion nailed the brief; right up to the website itself – a clean, simple interface, with a casually-posed bicycle that invites you to explore it. They work hand-in-hand to remind and reinforce the idea of an easy, leisurely and fun bike.

Does it evoke the same in you?

Trek Lime website