Hasta La Ideas

HTC launched the new HTC One (M8) to great fanfare in central London yesterday, it’s new DotView case stealing much of the show. Core77 UK correspondent Sam Dunne caught up with VP of Design Scott Croyle to talk industrial design on the front-line.

With the keynotes out of the way and a restless swarm of tech bloggers let loose on banks of demo handsets, we were plucked from the fray and ushered down a bright white corridor of pre-fab meeting rooms. A quick handshake and a warm smile, Scott takes a seat at a table strewn with a spectrum of handsets, apologizing for the smell of fresh paint. I mention the local joke that the smell follows the Queen around. He lifts his gaze and grins quizzically.

HTC’s VP of Design makes no attempt to hide his relief at another launch event done and dusted. “Selling,” Croyle tells me, “is a huge part of my job, of the designer’s job, both externally and internally… You gotta engage the business with stories to drive home innovations that are actually meaningful to people… even our engineers are selling their new stuff with fun little consumer stories now…” And then, of course, it’s showtime: “Giving the consumer the stories behind the design helps them engage with our work emotionally.” Getting up on stage, Scott admits, doesn’t come naturally, “but it’s so important for us as designers to put ourselves and our ideas out there… we’ve got to be confident and resilient if we want to be heard.”

As a leader within a massive organization, Scott eloquently elaborates on the ongoing battle of championing meaning in product development: “There’s a fire hose of information and stuff coming at you from all directions all the time… the only thing you can do is to filter it. With experience, designers develop what I call an informed intuition. You don’t need to know everything before you act. You do have to know when to trust your gut. These days, I can look at the title and summary of a report and know whether I should dig for more detail. It comes with practice.” With a wince of self-awareness, Scott speaks of the language he has armed himself with for fighting feature creep and mediocrity. “I don’t let anyone talk about differentiation, it’s not about that, it’s got to be better-entiated. I’m always talking about meaningful innovation… innovation by itself just doesn’t cut it.”

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It looks like Aramique Krauthamer has been keeping busy since we visited Nike’s “Art and Science of Feeling” pop-up experience last month. We encountered the NYC-based installation/interaction designer at the opening of “PLAY: A Visual Music Experience,” the latest installation that he’s designed with Fake Love for his ongoing collaboration with premium home audio purveyors SONOS. No brainwave sensors this time around: Since true haptic feedback would have required speakers with custom top panels, the ‘touch’ sensor is actually a discreet optical input, which toggles the colors of the ripple-like projections. The visuals reflect not only the amplitude of soundwaves (as in your iTunes visualizer) but also the pitch, tone and a few other attributes.

Frankly, I couldn’t tell the difference, but I did share Aramique’s interest in the custom ‘furniture’ he designed for each ‘room’ of the installation. The lucite boxes are embedded with LEDs that match the projects and were fabricated for the project, which is en route to SONOS’ Los Angeles studio after its one-night-only debut earlier this week. The occasion for the celebration is the worldwide availability of the new PLAY:1 speaker, which debuted two weeks ago, just in time for the holidays.

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Hidden hearing by Cynaps

If everything at CES actually worked (i.e., no concepts) and you won one of those grab-whatever-you-can-in-fifteen-minutes shopping sprees, what would you snag? We’ve worked out a short list:

The Cynaps Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headset is the perfect way to take noisy calls on a crowded city sidewalk (or CES exhibition hall floor). I tested the device out in person (it was embedded inside a baseball cap) and it’s awesome; just push your tragus—that little flap on your outer ear—closed, and you can hear audio coming in clear as day, transmitted through your bones.

The Cynaps is currently up for pledging on IndieGogo, and at $9,000 of $20,000 with 20 days left to go at press time, it could go either way. I should also point out that I’m of the opinion that they need to add a throat mic, though they claim their external mic picks up voices fine.

PiqX Imaging’s XCANEX portable scanner was one of the few devices on the showroom floor that actually looked like an industrial design project.

The portable, fold-flat device clips onto your laptop, and can then be used to “scan” (via snapshot) documents, books, receipts, you name it. The included software auto-rotates the image to the correct orientation while OCR sorts out the text, making it an easy, and quick, push-button solution. Also a great way to quickly scan ID sketches. Totally wish I had one.

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3D Systems seemed to be the only 3D printing company out in force at CES, perhaps because it was at last years’ that they debuted their Cube 3D Printer.

This year they pulled the sheets off of not one, but two machines: Their updated Cube 2, a faster and more accurate update to the original, and their larger CubeX, which can print “basketball size” (10.75″ x 10.75″ x 9.5″) in both ABS and PLA.

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On the crowded CES floor a company called Nexiom caught our eye, and as it turns out, we had caught theirs: “Ah, Core77!” exclaimed the rep, spotting our badge. “We recruited our designers off of Coroflot.” Hong-Kong-based Nexiom had spent years developing an interesting little technology, and hired some of you Coroflotters (you know who you are) to integrate it into a consumer-friendly product design.

We’ll start with what Nexiom developed, a super-flat battery they’re calling the Power Slate.

They’re ridiculously thin, about the same thickness as a USB connection.

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