What Happened to Design?
I’m one of those designers who fuss with things, think about stuff a lot, and judge good design on the combination of aesthetics, tactility, and functional elegance of simplicity. I don’t find complex messes good design, nor do I believe that “designing for the masses” is good design. I really don’t care what sells for $0.99 from shipping container loads – bad design made cheap enough to sell, is still bad design. I am far more interested in design that causes someone looking to spen $0.99, to pay $9.99, because the product is so evidently superior. Anyone can push volumes with throw-away procing, it takes expertise to deliver real value that enhances the human condition. Further, I believe that truly good design includes some amount of controversy caused by pushing the observer to see something new and unfamiliar – that will capture some, satisfy some, and offend a few. If the worst one can say about a product is that is is a little boring, I contend it is a design failure. Good design should create at least 2% negative “hate it” response, or it will never capture the 10% who will become advocates, committed addicts, and pure lovers of the product. the balance is found in creating a product that generates a certain number of over-commitment from more than it generates distaste. if it generates neither, it is nothing more than engineering without design.
Humans are junkies for stuff. The more we have around us, the better we ares supposed to feel. I believe we do have a fear of loosing stuff we care about, or having a favorite thing wear out and not be replaceable. Unfortunately, the marketing gurus have latched on to this. First, they fuel the addiction by flooding us with stuff to collect and stack around us. Second, they provide us so much of this cheap crap, that we set aside our love of quality and design in favor of cheap junk that barely satisfies the intended need. This allows us to avoid the risk of loosing something we care about, or having some favorite thing wear out. Better an endless stream of junk we don’t care about, that we can toss without concern when it fails, than to pay for something we eventually find priceless, that wears out. Marketers want us to buy the same thing over and over and over. They give us reasons to do just that – new models with added features, new styling, fresh colors, bigger advertising… etc… Wrap ourselves in piles of short lived, low performing junk – it’s the American way!
What better way to make something new than to jam it full of micro-processors, flashy blinky lights, digital readouts, and other such nonesense? Wrap all that in some shiny plastic and we have a winner! The design teams making these things will tell you about all the wonderful advancements in technology, and how surveys tell them these things get great response from focus groups, etc… Let’s not forget that the personality-less Hondas, Toyotas, Chevy’s, Fords, Hyundais, etc…. are all products of expert design teams, given the horrid assignment of developing the least risky product ever in the minds of consumers, trained for decades now to suspect anything with real style, or who fear actually choosing something they like, lest someone judge them. Better to own something that puts the dog to sleep than something that someone might not like. We’d rather be boring than controversial, seen as a spot in the dull gray fabric of humanity, than a star shining amongst the flat landers.
I personally have had my limit of gadgetry. I have a Corvette that at 25,000 miles has had to have driver and passenger side control modules replaced, has regular issues with stuck electric window regulators, intermittant door lok control, a battery sucked down from security system drain. The mechanics of the car are flawless, the gadgets are crapolla. This goes for my BMW 325is, which regularly has some warning or another on the dahs, that eventiually goes away, or requires the car to restarted – more gadgetry. Meanwhile, our older 318ti, with minimal doo-dad load, has had virtually no issues in 70,000 miles – except for one electric window regulator failure, something we have had issues with on viurtually every car we have owned at one time or another. I guess the general population has gotten so lazy that cranking a window is considered a deal breaker.
I’d love to have the ability to buy a car today without all the junk crammed into it. Manual windows, manual door locks, and toss all the phony marketing farf key without a key junk, witness protection brother is watching electronic interfaces, and a stereo that sounds great without including a super computer processor. I’d trade all the garbage any day for a car with personality, light weight, and simplicity in maintenance. I;d prefer time be spent on the design, the feel of the machine, and the ergomics. In other words, fire half the electrionics engineers and replace them with creative designers. Put more into molds for interesting shapes and great tactical components (like plastic that is no plasticy), and seats that don’t rock on the computer controlled, security interfaced, memory modules interactive junk rails. Just give me the old school lever adjusters on a rigid mechanism – more mechanical expertise, less electrionic wizardry controlling bad quality hardware.
For the designers out there who need to infuse every project with video game mind-warp virtual reality, I offer that there needs to be more time spent on hard reality, and less on the ether and magic of computer games in product design. The development of cheap made-in-China hardware controlled by made in Taiwan computer dood-daddery results far too often in product that is poor in function, complex for no reason, and short lived. When the failure of one $1.90 relay requires a customer to replace a $1,200 door control interface module, their is no value, and no coolness. When the failure of a $0.05 chip causes a failure of an entire $3,500 engine control module, someone might want to reconsider the sense in this obsession with gadgets.
Let’s give the electronics and hyped up marketing smoke and mirrors a break, and look hard at the principle that is always applicable – Keep It Simple Stupid. Design is the path to freedom from drudgery and marketing department fed fervor for crap. What has happened to the profession of design? Seems to have been replaced by the double edged sward of product death – Marketing departments demanding “features” to sell, coupled with Accounting departments constantly wringing every last penny out of cost structres. The results ahve grown to be cheaply made, overly complex junk that is short lived, poor in tactile feeling, and mindane in style to make itthe most widely acceptable. That’s not design at all, that’s just sad.
Nikola Tesla – The Unsung Hero of the Modern World
Tesla - image from wikibooks
If you are a fan and gear-head for volts and lighting, you have to be familiar with the guy that had a huge influence on our modern environment. This is Nikola Tesla, an immigrant from Croatia that thought beyond direct current from batteries and heated filament electric lamps. He once worked for Edison, but found him dull and uninspired. The two inventors had dramatically different styles. Edison was the plodding experimenter, who made his discoveries through a physically iterative process in physical bench tests. Tesla was the ultimate theorist, with a capacity to thing through concepts fully, before placing pen to paper, or committing to experimentation. He constructed demonstration of light, electricity, and magnetics only after being sure in his own mind of the outcome.
Tesla brought the distribution of Alternating Current power to the world, and revolutionized industry and life as we know it today. He also brought advancement to lighting in the form of advancing fluorescent and metal gas discharge sources, at very near the same time that filament heating using direct current sources were being developed.
Unfortunately, while Tesla was a showman (he put on some amazing demos of light and electricity) he was not the publicity hound or marketeer that other inventors of the era were. This set him up to be exploited by the likes of George Westinghouse, who essentially pushed Tesla aside to commercialize the AC inventions, without paying Tesla what was owed – which would have made Tesla the richest man in the world. Like the common crediting of the electric lamp to Edison, Marconi is widely claimed to be the inventor of the radio and radio transmission. In fact, Tesla’s patent for radio transmission, awarded in 1897, predates Marconi’s improvement patents of 1903. However, using family connections and a flair for commercialization, Marconi prevailed in recognition, while Tesla remained in the background.
For anyone who interested in the fascinating period from 1800 to 1908, where the modern world was birthed on the inventors who turned us away from fire light and animal exploitation to the electric and machine age of industrialization, Nikola Tesla is someone worth investigating in detail. You will be surprised and amazed by his work, and his reclusive personality!
These links are to biographical information and additional reading and books on Telsa:
Edison One of Many Inventors of the Light Bulb
Yes, Edison was a great inventor and contributor, but his position as sole inventor is a disservice to those who actually did invent the light bulbs we call incandescent today.
While it is common folklore to credit Edison with the invention of the light bulb, the little heater-light source gadget we know as the incandescent lamp includes a long list of iterations and contributors:
1802 – Humphry Davy demonstrates first incandescence
1809 – Humphry Davy invents the first electric light, using carbon arc.
1820 – Warren De la Rue created the first vacuum lamp using platinum coil filament
1835 – James Bowman Lindsay demonstrates prototype light bulb
1840 – Warren de La Rue creates lamp with coiled platinum filament
1845 – John Starr aquires patent for carbon filiment incandescent lamp
1850 – Edward Shepard invented an incandescent arc lamp
1850 – Joseph Wilson Swan started working with carbonized paper filaments.
1851 – Jean Eugene Robert-Hudin demonstrates incadnescent lamps
1854 – Henricg Globel, invented the first carbonized bamboo filament incandescent lamp.
1872 – A. N. Liodygin invents incandescent light bulb
1874 – A.N. Liodygin recieves patent for incandescent lamp
1875 – Herman Sprengel invented the mercury vacuum pump to create vacuum lamps
1875 – Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans patented a lightbulb.
1878 – Sir Joseph Wilson Swan invents longer-lasting electic lightbulb using cotton carbon filament
1879 – Thomas Alva Edison invents a carbon filament in vacuum bulb
1880 – Edison improves his lightbulb using bamboo filament, recieves patent for “improved” lamp
1903 – Willis Whitnew invented metal-coated carbon filament
1906 – Carl Schubel patents tungsten filaments (assigned to GE)
1910 – William David Coolidge invents improved process for making tungsten filaments
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