Hasta La Ideas

Our friends at frog design recently released a short documentary on Industrial Design in the Modern World, a kind of iterative manifesto (the consultancy’s first but certainly not their last), featuring several key players of the design team. We had a chance to catch up with Creative Director Jonas Damon on the broader message of the piece, as well as his thoughts on user experience and a possible revision to Dieter Rams’ canonical principles of design.

Core77: Can you elaborate on the points you touch on in the opening monologue? Specifically, to what degree do ‘traditional’ (or outdated) forms and materials embody value or character? For example, I recently came across an iPod speaker in which the dock opens like a cassette tape deck, which evoked a certain nostalgic charm despite being rather impractical (it was difficult to see the screen behind the plastic).

Jonas Damon: The opening monologue is about the physical constraints that have guided forms in the past vs. forms today, and the opportunities that arise from the absence of these constraints. ‘Honesty’ in design is a widely admired quality, and in the past that honesty was expressed by skillfully sculpting with and around a given product’s physical conditions, rather than just hiding or disguising these. So when products were more mechanical, they had a more imposing DNA that informed their character; their mechanics largely defined their identities. Many product types came preconditioned with an iconic, unmistakable silhouette.

Today, most products in the consumer electronics space can be made with a rectangular circuit board, a rectangular screen, and a rectangular housing. Therefore, the natural expression of these products today is limited to a rectangle—not really a unique identity. Expression of character becomes more nuanced and malleable. With that newfound freedom, we have to be more sensitive, judicious and inventive. These days, ‘honesty’ is more complex and difficult to design for, as it’s about the intangible aspects of the brand the product embodies.

Traditional forms and materials have cultural value because of their iconic, built-in character. The starting point for many contemporary consumer electronics forms is generic and sterile, so historical forms are often tapped to artificially trigger our memory-based emotions. It’s been a popular fallback that we may be a little tired of these days, but on occasion its been well executed, and even that can have merit.

Of course, the ‘flat black rectangle’ effect also implies a shift from traditional form-follows-function I.D. to a broader, UX-centric approach to design (i.e. some argue that Apple’s focus on iOS7 is simply a sign that they’ve shifted from hardware innovation to the UX/software experience). What is the relationship between hardware and UX?

Hardware is an integral part of UX. A true “user experience” is multi-sensory: when you engage with something, don’t you see, feel, hear, maybe even smell that which you are engaging with? (I’m not sure why anybody refers to solely screen-based interactions as “UX”; that notion is outdated) As an Industrial Designer, I am a designer of User Experience. ID has gotten richer since we’ve started considering “living technology” as a material. By “living technology,” I mean those elements that bring objects to life, that make them animate and tie them to other parts of the world around us: sensors, screens, haptics, connectivity, software, etc. By claiming these elements as part of our domain (or by tightly embedding their respective expert designers/engineers in our teams), we are able to create holistic designs that are greater than the sums of their parts.

(more…)