Studioclues

After you work on a product sometimes you lose track of it and it’s life out in the great wide open.  Once in a while you get to work on a second generation, but not always. If you are passionate about the design and want to keep track of what you have worked so hard on, you tend to look for it on TV, blogs, on the shelf, and once in a while your even get real user feedback via sites like Amazon.com. Pretty nice to see 4 stars:)

I like swinging by Amazon to hear the comments, whether bad or good. Because generally these comments are unbiased as they are free to write what they want. If people have a real gripe or a real satisfaction they are more likely to try to compile a real honest and logical comment that maybe might be useful for future products. Who knows?

I doubt they ever imagined that the guy that shaped the handle on their drill might be reading.

Black and Decker Cultivator rating’s  at Amazon

VPX tools ratings at Amazon

Black and Decker caulk gun ratings at Amazon

When you first start out in design school, the two two tools that you come into the game with are your hands. These hands are capable of manipulating a mouse, clicking buttons, waving a marker around, and of course actually “shaping” the design you are working through out of foam or clay, etc. As 3d modeling software gets cheaper, faster and more intuitive this idea of getting your hands dirty seems to be an old school way of working. These days it is possible in just minutes to change a few curves in my 3D model and then send that to a digital prototyping machine for printing.  A very  accurate, full color model would appear on my desk in a few hours. This is a fast and accurate way of working.

What we need to be careful of is losing that physical interaction with the product. When modeling in 3d you don’t have the ability to quickly change direction and try something different. When working with your hands you actually see the surfaces and material breaks form before your eyes and you can guide them with your hand. Proportions are accurately judged and can be adjusted on the fly. You can tell immediately if something looks off.

The one big downfall of working by hand is that it gets difficult when you need things to be accurate within a few mm. All of these models were created to get the design intent across to the 3d modeler. When you get into 3d that’s when you can push and pull surfaces to get those dimensions more accurate .

Let’s not get lazy or think we are above getting our hands dirty. It’s fun anyway and you get to have foam in your hair the rest of the afternoon.

I use a lot of mass produced products during my average day, and many of these products I tend to take advantage of the design. The design of these products is usually not that much superior to competitors and typically  does not pop out to me as memorable, but a few designs do. Well there is that thing called the “isomething”, that is pretty awesome, but then there is the Target prescription bottle (designed by Deborah Adler) in which I come into contact every morning and every night.

If you look at typical prescription bottles before the Target design , not much attention was paid to the graphical hierarchy of the information presented. The prescription bottle was a utilitarian product that was simply engineered to the most basic form.  The retail brand was the largest piece of graphic on the product and the name of the medication and the dosage pushed down into the small type face,standard information at the bottom. Deborah Adler, whose family background was in medicine, took the opportunity to look at the stagnant design of the current prescription bottle and transform it into here MFA thesis. She tookthe most valuable information and presented it boldly and let that dictate the rest of the design.

Read more about here ground breaking project that was so intelligently beautiful, that it was featured in the MOMA.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/health/features/11700/

The last couple of years we have seen 3D renderers such as Bunkspeed Hypershot and Alias Showcase come onto the market. These products offer Industrial Designers the ability to quickly, accurately and, impressively produce 3D life like product imagery in just minutes, with little technical knowledge or training.

The image at the bottom  left was done by me with very little effort in Bunkspeed. A $800 piece of software. I can instantly rotate the model and get any fully rendered view I would like in just minutes. The image at the right is  a photograph of an actual physical model fabricated by a prototype model shop. The model shop is employed by master model makers and also equipped with some of the most advance prototyped machinery in the world. Cost of the model is estimated at well over  4 times the cost of the Bunkspeed software (mentioned earlier at $800). To also take into consideration, the image at the right was taken by a professional photographer employed at $75 an hour.

Costs aside, take a look at the images and tell me which one is more believable, accurate,  crisper, and nicer looking. I’m gonna have to say the 3D render at the left look better overall.

If you want to throw in environmental concerns, the physical model is exponentially more environmentally impactful than the digital model.

To sum up even further, the image on the left was done by me in 1.5 hours with an $800 piece of software and was done 3 months BEFORE the photograph on the right. So this image on the left was available much much earlier than the physical model on the right could ever be produced.

Right now I have the pleasure of working with Taylor Langhals at sketchcrazy.com. Taylor is working as our Black and Decker Industrial Design intern for the spring semester. I keep trying to get him to draw drills but he keeps on sketching Alpha Romeos like this one below. HAHA. Just kidding, he is doing a great job. Check his site out.

Taylor will be heading back to CCS in a few weeks to finish his transportion design degree at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

I happened to somehow stumble onto the idea of searching for Black and Decker stuff on Twitter and found a ton of info on our products, which may or may not have been undiscovered. It’s 2010 now. I can update my website via text message , find a date with a few key strokes, or order pizza with the my pinky and see it arrive via satellite on a map.

Welcome to the digital age.

So I also stumbled onto the Iphone and it’s almost endless string of apps that  feed me more information that I can feasibly handle. This is a screenshot of Tweetdeck, just one of many of the dozens of tools that you can search Twitter on to find content in what subject interests you. If you look below you can see that am searching for industrial design and fixie’s. Two of my favorite subjects

So if you have watched any news in the last year you might hear the word Twitter. Don’t scoff just because you are over the age of 40. Twitter won’t hurt you. It is nice like a kitten. To sum up, it is just a text message database of billions of text messages to Twitter. They just happened to be cataloging and making them searchable.

So to summarize again. People who have cell phones. If they set up a Twitter account, they can text message to a secret number their “tweet”. Their tweet is now searchable and indexable and ther Twitter username now followable.

So to summarize the title, design research can be just a question into Twitter about a specific product. Maybe you have to develop a hashtag to follow your design subject. Maybe you can just search for your specifc product in twitter just to see see what people say. There can be many more ways to search for information. I am just point out the obvious. It’s kinda up to you to evolve it. This post will probably be obsolete by the time you read it. But keeping searching for information, its probably there.

I have been having debates with my colleagues and friends about a specific product that we make and a competitor product that has come into the market.We have made Dustbusters for 25 years in the form show in the image on the right.  This design was done by Carol Gantz over 25 years ago. We look at this design today and take it for granted. It has an ergonomic handle and a “streamlined” or directional design. For the time, it was a revolutionary design. A few years ago, Karim Rashid designed the Kone Vac for Dirt Devil. Many scoffed at is primitive shape, a cone. Ergonomically, it is not good at all. It comes in a few different colors and is marketed in a IPODesque sex style where individual images of the product are flashed before  you in a sequential, brilliant matter.

That being said, it is designed to be more form than function. The main compromise would be ergonomics. I tend to argue that ergonomics are not as important as people make them to be when you use the product for a 20 seconds at a time. On hand held products such as these, ergonomics tend to drive form substantially. When you throw them out of the picture you have the freedom to explore forms such these.

I don’t mind designing products in the philosophy that Karim has developed.

Luxology has released SLIK (Studio Lighting & Illumination Kit) for their 3d modeling and rendering software Modo. Lights and cameras in typical 3d modeling applications are represented by crude graphics and icons. These just give you the information that you need to control and aim the light. SLIK  is five steps ahead of that . As you can see in the image below, the lights and cameras are actually modeled accurately. This actually is a rendering from Modo in the image. I kinda think this is overkill and probably would be unnecessarilingly taking up my machine’s processing power. That said, it such a creative solution and can’t be much more intuitve than this.

At work we always joke around how people send us pictures of proposed designs in done in Powerpoint or Excel. We have seen some good ones I have to admit. I never knew the capabilities of Excel or PP before this though. Here is time lapse footage of an unbelievable transformer image done in Microsoft excel.

Boogie Board is a small “LCD” drawing tablet for only $30. I put LCD in quotes as the site calls it LCD but it doesn’t really seem to be. First off, it is monochrome, so this isn’t going to replace your Cintiq. the tablet is pressure sensitive though and the video here is kinda impressive for $30. Rumor is that they will make a version thta you can save the images on. That would be a huge plus for us designers!.