Hasta La Ideas

Good product design ideas once came in the form of simple, discrete objects. You would invent, say, a hammer with a claw on one side to remove nails, or one of those apple-peeling contraptions, or a piece of material that you’d place around a bare lightbulb to shield your eyes from the glare. And those objects provided an experience superior to what came before them—carrying a second nail-pulling tool, peeling an apple with your fingernails, squinting to avoid glare.

Increasingly our better experiences aren’t coming from new, simple objects, but the interconnectedness of technology. The iPod is a single object, yes, but it’s really a perfect storm of things—plastic molding, metalworking, hard drive storage, software, a small LCD, interface design—that was wrangled into a rectangle. All of those things except the interface design and exact form factor existed independently for years, but it was that masterful blending, coupled to the interface, that made it a hit.

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