When you see an object, you make so many assumptions about that object in seconds.
What it does, how well it’s going to do it, how heavy it is, how much you think it should cost…
The object testifies to the people that conceived it,
thought about it, developed it, manufactured it…
ranging from issues of form to material to its architecture
to how it connects to you – how you touch it, how you hold it.
Every object, intentional or not
speaks to who put it there.
We work as consultants, which means we work with a lot of different companies in a lot of different fields
But really our common interest is in understanding people, and
what their needs are. So if you start to think, really what these
do as consultants is focus on people, then it's easy to think
about what's needed design-wise in the kitchen, or the hospital, or in the car.
We have clients come to us and say, here's our average customer, for instance she's female,
she's 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids. And we listen politely and say, well that's great but
we don't care about that person. What we really need to do to design,
is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete,
or the strongest or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are,
the middle will take care of itself.
These are actually things I haven't seen in 1,000 years.
We tried to use less material, like here's one that's hollow inside.
A good friend of mine, Sam Farber, he was vacationing with his wife, Betsy.
I got a phone call one night, he was so excited he said he couldn't sleep.
And what he was excited about was he'd been cooking dinner with Betsy and she was making
an apple tart. And she was complaining about the peeler, that it was hurting her hands.
She had arthritis, and she just couldn't hang on to it. And it hit Sam at that moment
that here's a product that nobody's really thought about.
And our thought was, well if we can make it work for people with arthritis, it could be good for everybody.
We knew that it had to be a bigger handle. Kids have big crayons because they're easier
to hold onto. It's the same thing for somebody that might not have full mobility of the their hand,
they need something a little bit larger, that's a little easier to grip with a little less force.
So we did a lot of studies around the shape of the handle, the size of it, to come up with a size
that would be perfect for everybody.
But eventually we found a rubberized bicycle grip, and we basically did this.
So, it really goes through many, many, more iterations than you would think
to do a handle that's relatively simple in the end.
I think one thing with a hand pruner is that you have this constant friction happening
when you're closing it.
But I feel like here's the spot that really hurts, this is the biggest pressure point for me.
So it's like here in this area, on all four fingers, you have friction.
So when we start out doing a project, looking at these different tools to understand
how we can design a better experience for someone, ergonomically
So what we did here was to map it out, when we did the exercise with the glove, understanding where
the pressure points are, then we go into this process of developing models of some of the ideas.
One thing we realized with this model, if you compare with other hedge shears, a lot of them
just have a straight handle, you don't have any control over the weight. So if you're cutting
far down, you have to squeeze harder to hold the tool in place, otherwise it's going to slide
out of your hands. So by sculpting this handle area, it locks your hand around this form,
so you have to squeeze less, so you have a really secure grip.
We're really at the final stages of our design here, where we put them into a place where we can
control them much more closely to get them ready for manufacture, and that is known as CAD
or Computer Aided Design.
It's very important that we constantly are verifying our CAD
with physical models.
Once you get into that, we use a set of technologies that are called rapid prototyping,
so we can really finely control the ergonomics of these parts.
So there are the two halves that come out of the machine, and you can glue them together to make
an entire handle, and attach them to prototypes such as this so we can go out and feel the
comfort and work with it, and make sure our CAD model really represents our design intention.
The way we think of design is, let's put great design into everyday things,
and understand how to make these gadgets perform better.
And that's what we're always looking for whenever we design are ways we can improve
the way people do things, or improve their daily life,
without them even knowing it or thinking about it.
Japanese gardeners, the bonsai must be cut in a way,
that a small bird can fly through it. It's nice, isn't it?
But all the other trees, you also have to cut them.
It's much more so, in Japan. They have to cut them, they have to...
we would say... to design them. But why are we doing all this?
We are doing a lot, to design our world now, we even design the nature.
I remember the first time I saw an Apple product. I remember it so clearly because
it was the first time I realized, when I saw this product,
I got a very clear sense of the people who designed it and made it.
A big definition of who you are as a designer is the way that you look at the world.
And I guess it's one of the curses of what you do, you're constantly looking at something and thinking,
why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?
And so in that sense, you're constantly designing.
When we're designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product,
and some of those attributes will be the materials it's made from, and the form
that's connected to those materials. So for example with the first iMac that we made,
the primary component of that was the cathode ray tube, which was spherical. We would have an
entirely different approach to designing something like that, than the current iMac, which is a very thin
flat-panel display.
Other issues would be, just physically how do you connect to the product, so for example
with something like the iPhone, everything defers to the display.
A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way.
And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes,
it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed. It feels almost like,
well of course it's that way, why wouldn't it be any other way.
This is the bezel for the iMac. When we remove the aluminum for the display in the center,
we actually take that material and then we can make two keyboard frames from it.
These are literally just a couple of the stages of how you make the MacBook Air.
Rough cutting... this is for the keyboard well. And there is just a remarkable efficiency and beauty
to how much a single part can do, and one of things we push and push ourselves on is trying to
figure out, can we do the job of those six parts with just one.
This part actually starts off as this extrusion, this is an aluminum extrusion that goes through
multiple operations, most of them CNC machined operations, to end up...
to end up with this part. And you can see, just a dramatic transformation
between this raw blank and the final part. But what we end up with,
is a part that's got all of the mounting features, all of the bosses... this is just one part,
but this one part is providing so much functionality.
And this one part really does enable this product.
So much of the effort behind a product like the MacBook Air was experimenting
with different processes. There's a... it's completely non-obvious,
but the way that you hold... to get from this part, to this part...
there's an incredibly complex series of fixtures to hold this part in the different machine stages.
And we end up spending a lot of time designing fixtures.
The design of this, in many ways wasn't the design of a physical thing,
it was figuring out process.
It's really important in a product to have a sense of a hierarchy of what's important
and what's not important, by removing those things that are all vying for your attention.
An indicator has a value when it's indicating something.
But if it's not indicating something, it shouldn't be there.
It's one of those funny things, you spend so much time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious.
And if you think about it so many of the products that we're surrounded by, they want you to be very
aware of just how clever the solution was.
When the indicator comes on, I wouldn't expect anybody to point to that as a feature,
but at some level I think you're aware of a calm and considered solution,
that therefore speaks about how you're going to use it, not the terrible struggles
that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve some of the problems.
That's quite obsessive, isn't it?
We now have a new generation of products where the form bears absolutely no relation
to the function. I mean, look at something like an iPhone and think of all the things it does.
In "ye olden days" of what are called analog products, in other words they're not digital,
they're not electronic, something like a chair or a spoon. "Form follows function" tended to work.
So if say you imagine being a Martian and you just land on planet Earth, and you've never seen
a spoon or a chair before. You can guess roughly what you're supposed to do with them...
sit on them or feed yourself with them... by the shape of the object, by the way it looks.
Now all that has been annihilated by the microchip. So design is moving from this culture of
the tangible and the material, to an increasingly intangible and immaterial culture,
and that poses an enormous number of tensions and conflicts within design.
I think there are really three phases of modern design.
One of those phases, or approaches if you like, is looking at the design in a formal relationship,
the formal logic of the object. The act of form-giving, form begets form.
The second way to look at it is in terms of the symbolism, and the content of what you're
dealing with. The little rituals that make up... making coffee, or using a fork and knife,
or the cultural symbolism of a particular object. Those come back to inhabit and help give form,
help give guidance to the designer about how that form should be, or how it should look.
The third phase is looking at design in a contextual sense, in a much bigger-picture scenario.
It's looking at the technological context for that object, it's looking at the human-object relationship.
For the first phase you might have something fairly new, like Karim Rashid's Kone vacuum
for Dirt Devil, that the company sells as so beautiful that you can put it on display,
in other words you can leave it on your counter and it doesn't look like it's a piece of crap.
Conversely you can look at James Dyson and his vacuum cleaners. He approaches the design
of the vacuum in a very functionalist manner, but if you look at the form of it,
it's really expressing that, it's expressing the symbolism of function.
There's color introduced into it, and he's not a frivolous person, so it's really there to articulate
the various components of the vacuum. Or you could look at, in a more recent manifestation
of this kind of contextual approach, would be something like the Roomba.
There the relationship to the vacuum is very different. First of all there's no more human
interaction relationship, the relationship is to the room it's cleaning.
I think it's even more interesting that the company actually has kits available in the marketplace
through iCreate, and it's essentially the Roomba vaccum cleaner kit that's made for hacking.
People are really wacky, they've created things like Bionic Hamster, which is attaching
the play wheel or dome that the hamster uses as the driving device for the Roomba,
so it's the ultimate revenge of the animal on the vacuum cleaner.
How I think about it as a designer myself is that design is the search for form,
what form should this object take.
And designers have asked that question, and used different processes.
Hey, what about the forks for the bike? Can you make a few inquiries?
Because l'd love to do the forks, I think the forks would be really cool.
Well this is my little table of... one of my tables... you know l've got a whole workshop downstairs
which is just full of shit. But these are just things that I just find interesting,
and things I want to have around and look at. Sometimes these are the materials
that l'm looking for an excuse to use, as opposed to the other way around.
But things like Micarta, this is one of my favorite materials, and it's actually made of linen,
so it's a bit like wood, actually, it feels like a living material. And it's enormously heavy.
And these kind of weird meshes, how cool is that. I have no idea what they use this for...
it's like this stainless steel... braided... stuff.
My career didn't start after art school, it started when I made my first object
in my grandfather's garage. I remember my uncle had said as soon as I could tell the time,
he'd give me a wristwatch. So I figured out how to tell the time, and he gave me this wristwatch,
and I promptly pulled it to bits. I went out to my grandfather's garage and found an old bit of
Plexiglas and started hacking away at this bit of Plexiglas and drilling holes,
and I transplanted this movement from this once-working watch into it.
That was my first....
...design, I guess.
I grew up in a generation... you know I can remember when they landed on the moon.
I can't deny that that was a massive event in my life. All of my dreams were about the future.
What I want to do is to be able to have things that don't exist..... things you can't go out and buy,
or things that irritate you. Anger, or dissatisfaction at the very least,
plays such an important role in motivating you, to do what we do.
But ultimately my job as a designer is to look into the future,
it's not to use any frame of reference that exists now. My job is about what's going to happen,
not what has happened.
As a designer, my philosophy is fundamentally non-disposable,
and somehow trying to offer products that you want to keep,
and products that you feel most importantly will stand the test of time.
That hopefully won't date as badly as other things.
Because it's all about wanting to have new things, isn't it? Ultimately, we could all still be
using the mobile phone we had three years ago.
But you know we've all had about five in the meantime.
Of course I fundamentally believe that something that's well-designed should not necessarily
cost more. Arguably it should cost less. But the problem is that design has become a way
for a lot of companies to "add value" because something is designed, and therefore
charge more money for it.
And it will become more and more pervasive, and things will be
marketed in terms of design, in the future.
The idea of elitism and the idea of design are merged. And it's out of this kind of culture
that the idea of democratization of design comes from. I always tell people that I grew up
with good design in my home, with all the Joe Columbo
and Achille Castiglioni pieces, not because we were rich, or
my parents were educated in design. Not at all, we were totally middle class and my parents
are doctors. It's just because that's what you would find at the corner.
There's design that costs more, and design that costs less. Some of it is good, some of it is bad.
"Democratization of design" is an empty slogan, it should really not even exist.
Target, in particular, fell right into line with, and influenced a lot of pop culture thinking
about the importance of design and the virtue of design. The basic idea was good design is
something you want, good design is something that distinguishes you,
it's sort of a mark of progress,
if you are a person who recognizes good design it distinguishes you from all the naive and
corny bourgeois of the past, the past being everything up to that minute.
So you can now buy into that, you can buy into progress, good design, good taste.
And they had it available to you in a very attainable way.
Often the way that a product comes into being isn't because a bunch of expert designers
sat down and said, "What are the ten most important problems we can solve?"
There's a company that's writing a check. And what the company wants is new SKU's,
they want more stuff, and they want more people to buy it. And that's the name of the game.
We tend to want new things.
They can do something that has a different look, a fresher look, a newer look,
a new-now, next-now kind of look.
And the problem with spending a lot of time focusing on what's very now and very next
is that it isn't very forever. And that means it doesn't last, because there's someone else coming along
trying to design what's now and next after that. And part of their agenda,
whether it's over-articulated or not, is to make whatever used to be now,
Iook like then, so that people will buy the new now.
Cars are the biggest and most abundant set of sculptures that we have
in contact every day in our lives.
Although they're reproduced by machines, and computer milled stamps that make them,
actually every one of them was originally carved by hand, by men and women using techniques
not a whole lot different than Michelangelo.
Car designers are making extremely dynamic, sexy
objects, in theory. But in reality, they're bending metal, plastic,
glass. This isn't like a woman coming down a catwalk, where she's swishing the dress and
showing a little bit here and there, and getting your eyes to goggle. Unh-uh. This thing is frozen in time.
Which means we have to create it in a way so that you as the observer look at it,
and you put the motion into it, by the way you scan it. Because that car has to be a reflection
of that emotional energy that you want to see in it.
I believe very strongly in the emotional authenticity of the product, it should reflect what it is.
So if the car is a performance object it should have that feel.
It is quite bothersome to me when I see humanistic elements of a car being strangely handled.
For instance, cars have a face.
Well, you can have lots of faces. But when you put that one face on a car, it's there forever,
it's just one expression. And because cars have evolved to having two elements,
big taillights and a license plate, the backs of cars have also evolved a face,
also very interesting, and some of those are awfully... challenging.
How do we solve problems of lightness, how do we solve problems of efficiency? I think these
are things that are going to be difficult, but we can solve those. But the real challenges of car design
are going to be addressing the future generations' perceptions of what they want cars to be in their
Iives? Do they want them to fade into the background, and just be there when they need one?
Or do they want them to stand up and be a representative of them, basically like we grew up
with it, they're kind of like avatars. I show myself to the outside world through this car.
When you own the car and you drive the car, even your decisions about are you going to put
a bumper sticker on it... there's an idea of an audience.
I feel pretty strongly, and this is true not just for cars but for almost everything we buy, that our real
audience is really ourselves. And that the person that you're really speaking to
when you're speaking about why me in this car, why is this the right car for me...
you're making a statement to yourself about yourself.
In sort of an abstract way, you're thinking about what they might be thinking of you,
and whether or not they like your Obama sticker, or your Save the Whales, or...
or your Christian fish, or whatever it might be. But the crucial thing is the self,
it's your own audience, your own story of l'm not that guy, or I am that guy, or that woman.
Because the truth is no one cares, on the highway.
Design is about mass production.
Design is using industry to produce serialized goods.
And I try everything I can in the mass market to change the goods, that people who know
nothing about design, or the people who say they don't care about design, or the people who
don't believe their world should have contemporary goods in it.
Those are the people I think design can have such an amazing affect on their lives.
When I was a teenager, I had this white -- from Claritone, I think it was a Canadian company,
it was a white bubble stereo, with two bubbled white speakers.
And it was probably very inexpensive, it was a real democratic product. It was a turntable,
and the whole thing built in. And it was a beautiful thing... Looking back,
and thinking why it was a beautiful thing, was because it was very self-contained,
and the message was very strong and very simple, and at the same time it was very human.
There was a quality about it, it was like a womb, it was like an extension of us, somehow.
It was soft, it was engaging. And I used to have this alarm clock radio, a Braun,
that Dieter Rams designed in the late '60s.
And they were these objects in my life that I really was in love with, they brought so much to me.
And I can remember going through the teenage angst thing, of feeling depressed or something,
and lying on my bed, and I would just look at the alarm clock, and felt better immediately.
So I always had this really strong relationship with physical products.
There's something that moves through a lot of my forms, and that is to speak about a kind of
digital, technological, or techno-organic world. Somehow if I do things that are very,
very organic, but l'm using new technologies, I feel like l'm doing something in a way
that's a physical interpretation of the digital age.
We have advanced technologically so far, and yet somehow it's some sort or paranoia where we're
afraid to really say We live in the third technological revolution. I have an iPod in my pocket,
I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then somehow I end up going home and sitting on
wood-spindled Wittengale chairs. So in a way you could argue that we're building all these
really kitsch stage sets, that have absolutely nothing to do with the age in which we live.
It's strangel. I find it extremely perverse, in a way. I mean imagine right now, l'm sitting here on my
Iaptop, and l've got to go out. What am I going to do, get in my horse and carriage? Of course not!
Why do we feel like we need to keep revisiting the archetype over and over again?
Digital cameras, for example, their format and proportion, the fact that they're a horizontal
rectangle, are modeled after the original silver film camera. So in turn it's the film that defined
the shape of the camera. All of the sudden our digital cameras have no film.
So why on earth do we have the same shape we have. Now without sounding like a hypocrite,
I revisit archetypes, l've designed many chairs. With that given, you say, okay now l'm going to design
a chair. What can I do here? How can I put my fingerprint on it and differentiate it from everyone
else and every other designer? And am I playing a game to show I can differentiate?
or am I actually really doing something that is contributive? Because the big issue with design is,
are the things we are doing really making an affect and making change?
78% of the world is completely impractical. 78%% of the world is uncomfortable. You feel it.
You feel that hotel rooms are poorly designed, you sit in chairs that are very uncomfortable.
And it's craziness. Imagine that if you design a million chairs to date, or however many chairs have
been done in the world, why on earth should we have an uncomfortable chair?
There's no excuse whatsoever.
People need to demand that design performs for them and is special in their lives.
these objects that they buy.
If you can't make your GPS thing work in your car,
there should be a riot because they're so poorly designed.
Instead, the person sits there and thinks, "Oh, l'm not very smart, I can't make this GPS thing work."
I can't make the things work! This is my field and l can't make them work!
If you design something that's precious and that you really love, you're never going to leave that.
My father's briefcase, made out of a beautiful piece of leather, gets better with use. And l've inherited it
and l'll pass it on, right? It's a really interesting thing, sometimes I get that task which is:.
design something that gets better with use. There's very few things, they mostly degrade, but...
some things like this briefcase get better with use.
Now that's a pretty sweet tick-over, don't you think?
I like the concept of wearing in rather than wearing out.
You'd like to create something where the emotional relationship is more satisfying over time.
And you may not worry about it, or think about it... people don't have to have a strong
Iove relationship with their things, but they should grow a little more fond of them over time.
For example on the laptop that I designed, it's actually a magnesium enclosure
but it has paint on the outside. And when it gets dinged, if it's dropped and
a bit of paint chips off and you see some of the magnesium showing through,
somehow it feels better because of that.
The computer we call the Grid Compass, the Compass computer, arguably the first laptop
that was actually ever produced is this one. You could carry it with you, we designed it to be
thin enough to fit in half your briefcase, so you could put papers in as well.
Then there was a leg at the back that flipped down, to put it at the right angle, for using
the ergonomic preferred angle of 11 degrees. We wanted to devise a hinge that would allow it
to rotate so the display could come up, but also not let anything into the electronics behind.
So in order to avoid something like a pencil falling into it, let me just show you what could happen,
if you put a pencil on the back it would roll down and drop inside. I designed a scoop,
that would then self-eject the pencil when you closed it.
That was a little trick.... of that.
When I got the first working prototype, I took the machine home, really thrilled about
wanting to use it myself. And it was with great pride that I opened up the display and thought
how clever I was to have designed this latch and this hinge and all this stuff.
And then, I started to actually try and use it. And within a few moments, I found myself
forgetting all about my physical design, and realizing that everything I was really interested in
was happening in my relationship between what was happening behind the screen.
I felt like I was kind of being sucked down inside the machine, and the interaction between me
and the device was all to do with the digital software and very little to do with the physical design.
That made me realize that if I was going to truly design the whole experience, I would really have
to learn how to design this software stuff. That made me search for a name for it,
which we ended up calling interaction design.
Arguably the biggest single challenge facing every area of design right now is sustainability.
It's no longer possible for designers to ignore the implications of continuing to produce
more and more new stuff that sometimes we need, and sometimes we don't need.
Designers spend most of their time designing product and services for the 1 0%%% of the world's
population that already own too much, when 90%%% don't have even basic products and services
to lead a subsistent life.
Although a lot of designers believe emotionally and intellectually in sustainability,
they and the manufacturers they work for are finding it very difficult to come to terms with.
Because sustainability isn't some sort of pretty, glamorous process of using recycled materials
to design something that may or may not be in the color green.
It's about redesigning every single aspect, from sourcing materials, to designing, to production,
to shipping, and then eventually designing a way that those products can be disposed of responsibly.
That's a mammoth task, so it's no wonder designers and manufacturers
are finding it so difficult.
If one's really honest with oneself, most of what you design ends up in a landfill somewhere.
And l'm pretty sure most of the products that l've designed in my career,
most instances of the millions of things that have been produced are probably in landfills today.
That isn't something I was conscious of when l started working as a designer, it didn't even really
occur to me because it didn't really occur to us as a society, I think.
Now, to be a designer, you have to take that into consideration, because we have to think about
these complex systems in which our products exist.
If the shelf life of a high-tech object is less than 11 months, it should all be 1 00%%% disposable.
You know, my laptop should be made of cardboard, or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard,
or it could be made out of something like sugar cane or some bio-plastic, etc.
Why on earth does anything have to be built to be permanent?
If I think about my admiration for Eames, it was an admiration for his ability to identify
the qualities of new materials which could be used to create new objects. But nobody worried about
whether fiberglass was going to cause disease, or be difficult to dispose of.
Life was a little bit simpler for him, in that regard. He could just think about using the materials
for their best design attributes.
But now, we have to face this idea that what we do is not just the way we create some
individual design.
It's what happens afterwards, when we've finished our design and people have used it.
So this sort of "cradle to cradle" concept.
One of my very first projects was to design a toothbrush, a kids' toothbrush.
Brushes at that time typically were just a stick with bristles at the end, which was pretty boring.
So we introduced other materials to it and we made the handle thick.
And in the end it became a really successful product. But my boss,
maybe half a year after we launched the brush, went on vacation...
the idea was to go to the most remote beach. And the way Paul tells the story is
the next morning he steps out of the tent and he wants to go the pristine beach,
whales frolicking and all perfect, and what does he stumble over:. it's our toothbrush.
And it's there, and it's this brush, it's covered in barnacles, the plastic is faded,
the bristles are worn. This brush, within months of the product being launched, had been used up,
had been discarded, and found its way in the Pacific. So even though it's a little, small object,
it creates a big piece of landfill that apparently goes just about everywhere.
Let's go ahead and start defining some of the challenges and some of the questions we might be
asking ourselves. Is there any toothbrush that we'd actually feel comfortable washing up on the beach?
So much of the toothbrush does not need to be disposed of, right? You put the bristles
in your mouth, the rest of it is all cleanable material. Why are we tossing this stuff out every time?
There could be the greatest handle in the world, because if you only use one handle in your lifetime
you could make it out of sterling silver, it could be this heirloom and then you just replace the heads.
I think also the solution of the toothbrush assumes the only approach to oral care,
or one of the main approaches to oral care is through the toothbrush.
What is we didn't need toothbrushes? What could it be?
When I first started the company, the role of the industrial designer was primarily about the
aesthetics, or the cleverness around function, but it was always as a minor piece...
the company was in charge of the major piece, and we were hired guns to complete some aspect.
The question is actually not "What's the new toothbrush?" but "What's the future of oral care?"
A fortune cookie with floss inside?
As we grew it became clear that companies were happy for us to do more and more
of the actual design of the overall product.
I don't know, l'm really just enamored with the idea of doing teeth cleaning at NASCAR.
I kind of think of it as they do analytical thinking and we do this kind of innovative or design thinking
where we're more focused on user-centered ideas, stuff that will resonate with the people who
are going to actually use the product. We come in from the point of view of,
"What do people value, what are their needs?" And it just results in different products.
You get these things, and you break them apart and it's like a wishbone.
The big design challenge here is there's a lot of things we care about and
cleaning our teeth is probably not high on that list.
I think the wishbone is nice, but it should take the real shape of a wishbone.
Design thinking is a way to systematically be innovative. You know how some people make lists,
designers make what I call mind maps, where they keep going further and further.
Something leads to something else, which leads...
And as you're branching out you're getting to new ground, where your mind
has never taken you before. And that's where interesting design stuff happens, in my mind.
When I came into design,
designers would be at their drawing boards, one, and they'd work at the
drawing boards. They would maybe have some magazines and things to
Iook at to inspire them. One of the things that I did when I came was drag people out of the studio
into the environment, and put designers in the position of looking at people,
and going through the steps that other people were going through as a source of inspiration.
It's really about trying to make an empathic connection with people in their context.
Is that Helvetica?
It's not Helvetica, no.
So that as designers we're picking up on the vibration of what they're about,
and being able somehow to identify with that, and have that spur our
creative thinking and creative response.
Technology, and things you keep, things you love, things that get better with time.
Cool.
I think today, I see my role as a designer to help define what we should be creating for people,
and the output is not necessarily obviously a design, it's not obviously a product.
Recently we designed a new banking service for one of the big banks here in America.
And there are two and a half million people using that savings account today.
So we're not just giving form to the thing that has been created.
I think that what designers will do in the future is to become the reference point for policymakers,
for anybody who wants to create a link between something that highfaluting and hard to translate,
and reality and people. And I almost envision them becoming the intellectuals of the future.
I always find it really funny, the French, whenever they have to talk about the price of gas or
the cheese war with ltaly, they go to a philosopher, right? You know, it's kind of hilarious but
philosophers are the culture generators in France. I want designers to be the culture generators
all over the world, and some of them really can. And no matter what, they should become really
fundamental bricks in any kind of policymaking effort, and more and more that's happening.
But I see designers as designing not any more objects, per se, in some cases yes,
but also scenarios that are based on objects that will help people understand the consequences
of their choices. And people like Dunne and Raby do that, exactly, they call it design for debate.
We use design as a medium to try and explore ideas, find out things, question.
We've got cinema, fine arts, literature, craft...
every other medium seems to have a part that's
dedicated to reflecting on important issues, yet design, the thing that's responsible for so much
of the built environment around us doesn't do that. I think that's one of the things that attracts us.
So even though our design ideas are never really put into mass production, we always try to
suggest that they could be mass-produced or they could be on the scale of hundreds of thousands,
because that's part of what we're interested in.
We love the idea that with a product, or shopping... we love showrooms.
Because what is a showroom, you go in there, around lKEA and you imagine this is in your home,
you project yourself into this other space. But you could actually buy that and have it at home.
It's true, when you walk into a gallery, you don't imagine the sculpture at home and how it's going
to impact on your life. But if you walk into a shop, whether it's electronics, or furniture, or a car
showroom, you do imagine yourself experiencing this thing and enjoying it.
So when we do conceptual products, we're hoping that people will imagine how that will impact
on the way they live their lives.
We were part of an exhibition and Fiona and l decided to focus on robots.
There are four of them altogether.
One of them, for example, might become the interface for important data you keep online
or on remote servers. So it's a strange, wooden shaped object that you pick up
and it has two holes at the top, and you stare at its eyes for about five minutes.
And when it's checked it's you, it releases the information. So it's not just a quick glance
at a retinal scanner, but a meaningful stare into this machine's eyes. And also you feel better, you feel...
"Yes, it gets me," and then you access it...
"There's no chance it mistook me."
Another thing we became interested in is as devices become more clever or more smarter,
one of our roles as designers might be to handicap the technology and make it dependent on us
in some way, or needy. So we thought it might be interesting to design one that has
to call the owner over to it whenever it wants to move.
We really wanted to look at the materiality of what a robot might be, so one of the key things
we wanted was when someone saw the robots, we wanted them to go, "Well that's not a robot."
That's not even within the robot language. But the minute they ask that question, then they're
immediately thinking, well what is a robot, what a robot should be, what kind of identity it might have.
People, especially students, often say at the end of lectures, "But you just design things that
get shown in museums and galleries, shouldn't you be trying to mass produce?" And because we're
more interested in designing to deal with ideas, actually putting things into a museum like MoMA
reaches hundreds of thousands of people, more than if we made a few arty and expensive
prototypes. So I think it depends, I think we're interested maybe in mass communication
more than mass production.
Industrial design has been so closely tied to industry, and working within the constraints
set by industry. Very quickly you come to edges of the spectrum of choice, the official choice,
of what kinds of things that the companies who produce these products believe people want.
And we know, people want a lot more interesting things, but so far we haven't managed to...
to cross that gap.
People are creative, by nature, and always not quite satisfied with the design of something
that they have, that they've bought. They adapt it.
Is there some way we can better engage with people's creativity to make more of it
or to enhance what they can do for themselves, or create the tools or the platforms
from which people can operate.
The tools with which we do design today are our tools.
We make the shapes, people buy and use the shapes.
Tomorrow, this will be different. The tools to make things, and to define your world,
will be available to everybody.
Because of the connected world, the idea of designing something for a different community
in a different part of the world is now becoming very much more prevalent.
Before there was a sense that Africa was so far away you couldn't do anything about it,
but now there seems to be a sense that because of the connected world, we can make a big difference.
As designers I think we're so far removed from the actual object. You can design virtually,
prototypes can be made remotely, the actual product's often manufactured on another continent
That's why a lot of the products we're surrounded by, a lot of our manufactured environment,
seems too easy, too superficial.
If I had a billion dollars to fund a marketing campaign, I would launch a campaign on behalf of
"Things you already own, why not enjoy them today?"
Because we all have so many things, they're just around, they're in the closet, in the attic,
that we don't even think about anymore, because there's not enough room left in our brains
because we're so busy processing all the exciting new developments.
At the end of the day, when you're looking around at the objects in your house, and you're deciding,
"What here really has value to me?" They're going to be things that have some meaning in your life.
The hurricane is coming, you have 20 minutes, get your stuff and go. You're not going to be saying,
"Well that got an amazing write-up in this design blog." You're going to pick the most meaningful
objects to you, because those are the true objects, that truly reflect,
the true story of who you are, and what your personal narrative is, and the story that you're
telling to yourself and no one else because that's the only audience that matters.