Hasta La Ideas

It drives me nuts when laypeople do not understand the variability possible in industrial design—for example, those folks who feeel the iPhone is the only possible form factor for a smartphone and that therefore Samsung is in the clear. Apple reduced the shape to a minimalist rectangle, but the thing designers understand—that laypeople don’t—is that even within those boundaries, there is a world of room for design and design innovation.

Until a competing smartphone designer comes along to demonstrate this, here’s a somewhat broader example. Lately we’ve seen a multitude of variations on the idea of modular shelving. Up top you see takes on this by Ismail Ozalbayrak, Juan Pablo Quintero and Antxon Salvador. If I showed a layperson, say, Salvador’s version, which is probably the most basic in the way the iPhone is, they’d probably have a hard time imagining any other way to do modular stacking shelves. But as you can see, up above are three different ways.

And here’s a fourth, called the Unit Library and designed by Tel Aviv/Paris-based Itamar Burstein:

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