We recently attended a conference which described different product development strategies, one of which is the “razorblade” model. Developed by Gillette, its based on the principle of virtually giving away the razor handle ensuring that consumers have to buy your razor blades (HP have a similar strategy for printers too).
We started to debate the idea of designing in obsolescence in products which got us onto the subject of the obsolescence of life itself (disclaimer…we’re not taking drugs!).
As we make huge strives in Genetics, inevitably somebody will finally discover the way to stop the ageing process altogether; which we’ve christened the ‘live forever pill’. On the face of it this may seem the ultimate goal of genetics…to cheat death altogether…but is this a good thing?
The social impact of living forever is immense beyond the one of over population. Imagine a world where you wake up in the morning, guaranteed to make it to the following night; we think this would be terrible…and here’s the reason why.
Life has risks, the one in a million chance of getting struck by lightning when out for a walk. The one in a million chance of the airliner crashing when going to your holiday destination. The less than one in a million chance of getting killed in a car crash (and even higher on motorbike). Our point is to live you have to take some sort of risk to get through and enjoy life; take away the risk…you take away the very essence of life itself.
It’s a paradox that the fact we know life becomes obsolete makes life itself enjoyable. So are there lessons in Design…we suppose that if the original mobile phone bricks were not made obsolete…we’d never have progressed to the iPhone. So, like in many other fields of design…nature tells us something about the value of obsolescence!
We’ve just come across an interesting article in the June issue of the TCT Magazine entitled Good Design – Dying Out Or Evolving and it has got us hopping mad.
The premise of the commentators on page 1 of the article seems to suggest that the tools available to modern designers are, somehow detrimental, to consumers and buyers of design alike. Somehow, because 3D CAD and rapid prototyping allows for the rapid creation of ideas for consumers to approve prior to being mass manufactured is somehow bad.
What utter nonsense! The ultimate democracy in design is the purchasing power of the consumer to decide what they like and want to buy; the consumer is absolutely king!
Don’t get us wrong there is a role for Art and a logic to the commentators views in the world of Art. However Art is somewhat different to Product Design; Art is about the Artist communicating emotions to their audience which they may then choose to ‘democratise’ by buying it! Others won’t but this is down to personal choice. Product Design, on the other hand, is much more focused towards consumers and the mass purchase/democratic habits of that community.
Don’t tell us that Apple did not use focus groups in designing the iPhone…this has got one of the cleverest user interfaces we’ve ever seen. Don’t tell me James Dyson didn’t talk to customers about what they needed from a vacuum cleaner design.
We do get infuriated by the pomposity of some in the design community. Thankfully our feet are firmly on the ground. We understand the democracy of consumer good purchases and the need to design products which the consumer demands.
Art for Artists…Design for Designers please!
This is not our usual blog; it’s a little self indulgence…apologies!
Despite the recession, Fripp Design and Research are bucking the trend.
We’re pleased to announce the arrival of the latest member to our Product Design team; Lewis Green. Like many of our other designers, Lewis is a Masters Graduate in Product Design from Sheffield Hallam University.
We’ve also invested £42,000 in a new 3D Camera system as part of a major research project we are undertaking with Sheffield University which means we need more space.
We thought we might have to leave the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Centre, but we’re pleased to say that Yorkshire Forward have agreed to help us stay on the Park, giving us extra office space next to our existing offices, as we represent what their strategy is all about; supporting the creation of world class businesses bringing quality employment into the region.
Our normal blog will return as normal after this!!!
Climate change is THE hot topic where we are seeing significant public funding being provided to innovators to develop solutions to the challenges of dealing with climate change (not wanting to be boring; the climate has always changed!) as well as companies being able to demonstrate carbon neutrality.
There are a plethora of initiatives out there to help reduce our carbon footprint; but is this the only problem we need to deal with?
Entropy is the process of the change of state of energy and is irreversible. So, for example, if you lift a glass into the air; you give the glass something called potential energy (which has come from the muscles in your arm). If you then drop the glass, it will turn the potential energy into kinetic energy as it travels towards the ground. When it hits the ground, all that kinetic energy is turned into vibrational energy which breaks the chemical bonds holding the glass together and, of course it shatters…and all this energy came from your muscles in the process of lifting the glass up in the first place. The point of Entropy is that the total amount of energy remains the same through the whole process; it just changes its form; muscle to potential, to kinetic, to vibrational, however what you can’t do is reverse the process i.e. turn the smashed glass back into the chemical energy that was released from your muscles.
So what are we saying? When designing for carbon neutrality (or a reduction in carbon); what is the total amount of energy used throughout the entire process; which has to include all the costs of designing, manufacturing, distributing, delivering, installing and using an environmentally friendly device.
For example, the hybrid car. Yes they reduce the amount of carbon pumped out into the atmosphere at the point of use but what about the energy required to make the hydrogen in the first place? The same with wind turbines. When calculating their effectiveness in reducing carbon in the atmosphere; has the cost of making, shipping them etc been included in the total climate change impact?
For Fripp Design; when doing research into projects that involve the climate, we believe Entropy is as important to measure as the impact of carbon dioxide.
This morning one of our Directors got the two finger salute from a driver on her way to work. This got us thinking. In the UK new parents often have a ‘baby on board’ badge stuck in their rear view mirror and, for the life of us, we cannot work out what it is supposed to mean; do they want drivers behind to go oooooor, do they want us to offer baby sitting services, are they looking for donations towards their children’s future education…we really don’t know. Although this is tongue in cheek, we suspect what it really means is “back off buddy…my most precious possession is in the back of this car!” So why doesn’t the sticker say this?
Product Design can be like this; clients can, sometimes, get very precious about their view of what a design should look like without taking into account how their customer will perceive the design and what it means to them as a customer.
The answer could be that the design should only ever be designed to meet the function it is designed for; but that fails to take into account our desire for things that look cool and are highly fashionable. We’re not saying we know the answer…but we know lots of designs we’d like to stick two fingers up at!
In the past week, two people at our offices have become new parents and this has got us thinking about how remarkable life is and is it designed to be that way? Promoters of Evolution and Natural Selection make it clear that natural selection is an evolutionary process and there is no design or need for a designer; the evolution comes about when a mutation changes a physical attribute which benefits an animals survival (or not!); which is then passed on to the next generation. As this borders on areas of religion and faith we’d rather not pass comment, however it did get us thinking about the parallels between the world of product design and natural selection.
When a design goes into manufacture it is replicated many times (like reproduction in nature) and parts that are not manufactured the same as others are discarded. But unlike nature, a production line only ever produces ‘mutations’ which are inferior to the desired output. But we all know products evolve (cars, aircraft and consumer devices being the very obvious ones); so where do the positive mutations come from? Well we guess it has to be the product designers?
If you think about it, every time we do concept design for our clients, we are creating a mutation of an existing design; the client chooses the designs which meet the desired output (which is normally to compete against another product in the competitive world of commerce where the rules of survival of the fittest certainly applies!) and the others are discarded; not dissimilar to what happens in nature.
There certainly seems to be parallels between nature and the world of Product Design. If that is the case; is Product Design another name for mutant design? Are our designers all mutants (we hope they don’t read this blog…might have a mutanty (sorry can’t help the pun!) on our hands)!
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