DesignAday

Clever Little Bag

My favorite IDEA 2011 winner has to be Puma’s Clever Little Bag, which won a gold award in the Packaging category. Once again, I recommend pointing your browser at Fuseproject’s own website to learn about it. Like so many great, contemporary designs, this is the result of taking an object that hasn’t changed in decades—the shoebox—and finding a better solution.

The challenge was to look at one of the most difficult and stagnant issues facing the retail industry in regards to sustainability and environmental harm: packaging, and more specifically shoeboxes. Boxes contribute to millions of tons of waste a year and even with proposed second uses, they are eventually thrown out.

The cleverness of the solution is told by the numbers:

• 65% less cardboard used
• 8,500 tons of paper saved
• 20 million megajoules of electricity saved
• 1 million liters of water saved
• 10,000 tons of CO2 saved
• 500,000 tons of diesel saved
• 275 tons of plastic avoided

This is design at its best, creating work that serves the client, their customers, and the environment.

IDEA 2011

IDSA announced the winners of IDEA 2011 at the end of June. I’m finally getting around to perusing the gallery. There are a lot of great designs, of course, but one in particular immediately caught my eye due to it’s similarity in concept to one of my student’s projects.

Pure is a water bottle designed for adventure tourists and world travelers that filters and sterilizes water from any source within two minutes. Pure contains two chambers. Dirty water is scooped up from a lake, stream or dirty puddle by the outer chamber. The inner chamber is then plunged through it, filtering water particles as small as four microns. Once filtered, the water is sterilized by a wind-up ultraviolet bulb.

Having used finicky water pumps on backpacking trips, I love this design. My student had a similar idea, but unfortunately didn’t take the time to research the science and technology behind water filtration. The end result was a concept and form study with nothing real to back it up. Timothy Whitehead of Loughborough University, on the other hand, has a working prototype that is proven to filter out 99.9% of impurities. It was also the recipient of a 2010 James Dyson Award. A more detailed write-up can be found on Inhabitat.

Let’s see some I.D.

I.D. was America’s premier magazine about contemporary product design and material culture from 1954 through 2009.

To be honest, I didn’t realize the magazine had closed shop, but this is the introduction to the new I.D… not-a-magazine. Yes, the URL is www.id-mag.com, and the page title is “ID Magazine Served”, but there is no magazine here, or at least, not what I consider to be one. It’s a gallery displaying industrial design projects from the Behance Network. Now, I’m not too familiar with Behance—it hasn’t been on my radar—but it seems to me it is lacking curation. There at first appears to be no categorization, so it is a random jumble of projects ranging from fantastical concept explorations to actual, name-brand products. Once you view a particular project, however, you will find keywords that can be clicked to view a filtered gallery. It’s mostly images with very little description. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d say it’s just a showcase for people’s portfolios. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s misleading to give it the “I.D.” moniker and call it a magazine. I’ll stick with the likes of Core77, Design Observer, and Johnny Holland.

The one thing I am pleased about is the continuation of the I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review. It has an esteemed panel of judges and looks to be a class act.

The One Thing

I participated in a survey Apple is conducting. It asked a single question: What is the one thing you would like Apple to improve upon and why?

That’s very like Apple—simple and direct. I really had to think about it. I decided that the one thing I would like to see Apple improve upon is support in their products for a family unit. Historically, computer software has been designed for a user. Yes, operating systems have added the ability to host multiple user accounts, but it is currently not all that easy to manage the calendars, address books, photos, music, movies, books, apps, and similar media that are shared by a family. I began a media library for myself and expanded it to include my wife. My daughters are growing up, and it won’t be long before they will be wanting to purchase their own digital media and have their own photo collections. I need to put a plan in place that will allow us to do this in a sensible way. Apple has made a start of it with shared music libraries, but I don’t believe it has been a focussed effort. My address book should understand that many of the people it includes are related to each other. Music purchased by one of my daughters should be merged into the family collection where it is available to be played on any of our various devices. This has ramifications for security and copyright laws. Eventually, my children will inherit my collection.

Our digital lives are becoming tightly integrated with our analog lives, and they need to better reflect our interpersonal relationships.

Rethinking the Smoke Detector

Octavia Steffich thinks the common smoke detector is ripe for a redesign. During the class I taught last semester on innovation by design, she identified a number of issues that could be addressed with the thoughtful application of technology. Of particular annoyance is the method by which it communicates that the battery must be replaced. It chirps, perhaps once a minute or so. This always happens to me in the middle of the night. Then I have to shuffle through the house trying to figure out where it is coming from, stopping in each room and waiting for it to chirp again. In addition, it’s often difficult to remove and replace the cover, and it can be difficult to replace the battery.

Octavia identified these issues through her own experience, as well as by interviewing other people. Her design addressed each of these problems very effectively. Rather than relying solely on sound, the prototype has red LEDs that give off a glow around the edges when the battery is low. This won’t wake you up in the middle of the night, and it is easy to tell which detector needs a battery. It can send a message to your phone via Bluetooth when you are in range, reminding you to replace the battery when you are nearby, and thus able to act on the reminder. The faceplate is held on by magnets and is thus easily removed and put back on. A small LCD display inside the detector displays a battery meter and the recommended dates on which the battery and detector should be replaced.

The concept was favorably received by potential users. There’s no surprise there—I want them in my house too.

Watch Out

Back in December, my company showed its appreciation to all of the employees that have been with the company ten or more years by recognizing us at a holiday lunch and presenting us each with a watch. That may sound a little cliché, but it was heartfelt, and it is a very nice watch. It’s an Ebel model—very expensive. Apparently, the cost doesn’t come from an investment in Interaction Design.

When I went to Boulder, I was in a different time zone, but I couldn’t figure out how to set the watch. There is a knob on the side, as most analog watches have, but it wouldn’t turn, and I could pull it out. The watch hadn’t come with a manual. Google wasn’t able to turn up any useful information on the subject. I ended up not wearing the watch during the conference. When I got home, the watch was again the right time, of course, so I forgot about it.

The watch also displays the day of the month. Well, on Tuesday, March 1st, it said that it was the 29th. Once again, I went to work trying to figure out what to do with that knob, chipping my fingernails in the process. I asked my coworkers, and none of them knew either. The next morning, the other designer I work with triumphantly proclaimed he had figured it out. You had to turn the knob counter-clockwise to unlock it. Then the knob could be pulled out into two different positions to control the time and date.

There were a number of problems that kept me from discovering the solution. First of all, the lack of instructions, both in the box and online, is utter lunacy. Even so, I should have been able to figure out. Why couldn’t I? The knob was very tight. I tried turning it both directions, but I didn’t want to force it. I tried harder to turn it clockwise, as I have had watches that would only let you turn the hands forward. And it requires you to rotate it quite a bit before it unlocks, so even once you get it to turn, you may not turn it far enough before deciding that you are “doing it wrong.” Finally, I’ve never had a watch that required the knob to be unscrewed before it could be pulled out. It was unfamiliar, unintuitive, and uninformative: a triple threat.

PickGrip

Emily Kerwin is an amateur guitarist who has had the experience of dropping her pick during a performance on stage. She focussed on this problem during my class last semester. After surveying the range of picks available and researching potential solutions, such as Gorilla Snot, she began brainstorming. She sketched a number of concepts very early on and was therefore able to do a lot of rapid prototyping during the course of the semester. She tried out elastic bands, moldable foam, clips, and a mechanism that allows the pick to swivel out of the way.

Based on feedback from user testing, she finally settled on two solutions. The first was a rubber sleeve that would fit any standard pick, giving it a bit more thickness and a little friction. The second solution was a clip with an elastic band. The products would be most useful for beginners and older players with arthritis or other grip strength problems.

Palette

Yan Zhao comes to design from a fine arts background. She realized that she has been dissatisfied with the standard painting palettes available for artists and decided to design a better one in my class last semester. She identified the thumb hole as a major weakness—it makes it harder to clean, more likely that you’ll get paint on your hands, and takes up valuable space from the working surface—so she made it one of her goals to design a better way to hold the palette. She created a series of foam core prototypes, trying out different handles and shapes. She settled on a strap on the bottom of the palette, placed a guard on the side that rests against your arm, and sized it to fit perfectly within a painting box. She also added a brush holder that swivels out from the end. She tested the prototypes with other painting students.

Most of her feedback was very positive. One surprise response was that everyone liked the extremely light weight of the foam core prototype. So, with some modifications based on feedback, she produced a finished product out of masonite and leather. Yan is using it now.

Hanger

Clothes hangers come in a wide variety of designs, but by and large they all suffer from the same basic problems:

1. They leave indentations and bumps on the shoulders of shirts and sweaters.
2. They can easily become entangled or fall off in a crowded closet.
3. They are hard to carry.

When my shirts and pants come out of the dryer, they are immediately hung from the shelving in our pantry/laundry room. Eventually, I grab them all and carry them upstairs to my bedroom closet. The hooks on the hangers do not make good handles, especially when I’m carrying twenty or so. The thin wire presses into my skin, cutting off circulation.

Rortanak Sy took on the challenge of designing a better clothes hanger in my class last semester. He interviewed men and women in different age groups about their use of hangers, including one professional organizer. Then he sketched out some ideas and prototyped his strongest concept by bending and welding a steel rod.

My favorite part of the design is that rather than the typical hook, he created a big loop that makes for a very nice handle. Many of the hangers could be slid onto a forearm, solving my carrying problem. One side of the loop is a carabiner-type clip that allows the hanger to be easily placed onto a rod and keeps it from accidentally falling off. He also shaped the hanger with a more natural curve that doesn’t put bumps in shirt shoulders. Between the handle and the curve, the hanger very much resembles a person—imagine that.

While he didn’t do any cost analysis to see how his design would compare to other hangers on price, his prototype is quite successful, resulting in a hanger that does indeed solve the problems he set out to solve. With some small tweaks to the size and perhaps a change in material to make it lighter and lower cost, I think it’s marketable. I would buy it.

Dri-Mate

Kofi Opoku believes that umbrellas are a nuisance to carry, especially when they are wet.

After using your umbrella in the pouring rain, it gets drenched with water. So what do you do? You usually leave it at the doorway for the water to drip off, or if you’re hitching a ride, you’ll have to worry about handling the soggy umbrella in such a way that it does not mess up the neat interior of your benevolent friend’s car.

Determined to develop a solution, Kofi brainstormed a number of ideas ranging from a redesign of the umbrella to an umbrella rental service.

He settled on an accessory for an umbrella. The Dri-Mate would be a container for a small umbrella that would absorb the water left on the umbrella after use. It would clip onto a bag or belt loop for hands-free carrying. He proceeded to prototype the product using found objects such as can cozies, shammies, and chenille. He then used the prototypes to gather feedback from potential users.

After several revisions to the prototype and further testing, Kofi modeled the final design and illustrated a scenario of use. It’s a reasonable solution to the problem and may appeal to those that regularly carry around small umbrellas. At the very least, it was a good exercise of the design process as it applies to innovative product development.