Hasta La Ideas

When it comes to designing for the military, there’s not a huge distinction between industrial design and apparel design: Gear is gear. Whether it comes out of a sewing machine or an injection molding machine, form follows function, function is everything, and aesthetics don’t matter worth a damn. That makes military design appealing to me (independent of the politics of warfighting).

I’d been hearing good things about this design & manufacturing company called Tactical Tailor, based in Washington state. Here’s an example of what they design and make, and some of the thinking that goes into it:

In addition to that plate carrier, they produce literally hundreds of tactical products ranging from pouches, bags, holsters, slings, vests, armor, apparel, you name it. The customer base ranges from individuals to law enforcement entities to government orders that come in the tens of thousands.

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We’re seeing so many objects here where the form has nothing to do with the function, as a designer it’s almost… offensive. So it was almost refreshing to run across this weird massage products section, where things need to be shaped in such a way as to interact with the human body. The area was hard to miss, because there were quietly moaning people apparently being eaten by chairs (like this one by Infinity):

Then across from him, we saw this dude:

Guy on the right is getting his eyeballs massaged, in addition to the top of his head. A company called Breo USA (ironically, a Chinese company based in Canada) makes a ton of different portable battery-powered massagers targeted towards different areas of the body, and he’s wearing their iDream 3 Eye & Head Massager.

Breo’s Mini Body Massagers are designed with different shapes at the business end, depending on where they’re meant to contact.

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In earlier days I worked on tons of bottle designs for consumer products, and never once got to spec the color out. It was all decided by marketers privy to the unassailable Focus Group Results. They handed me a Pantone chip, and I made sure the renderings matched.

Those of you who are in a position to spec colors might want to look at this, at least if you’re designing containers for products meant to be ingested: A recent article in the Journal of Sensory Studies, a scientific journal published by the Society of Sensory Professionals (I swear I’m not making that up) reveals that the color of a dish, plate or bowl affects how the food tastes.

[Researchers] raised an experiment where 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four types of plastic cups, the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white.

The results reveal that the chocolate flavor served in orange and cream colored glasses [were liked] best [by] the volunteers who tested it.

[Other examples include using] more yellow cans to better perceive the taste of lemon soda or cups if they are painted in cool colors like blue, seem to quench thirst better than the warm, like red. And if they are pink, the liquid [has an] even more sugary note.

In other cases, it has been shown that a strawberry mousse dessert [is perceived as] more intense on a white plate [than a black one].

For coffee, a majority of respondents associated the brown package [with] a stronger flavor and aroma, while red is attenuated, and if colored blue or yellow, [drinks are perceived as more soft.]

If you’re wondering why there are so many brackets in the excerpt above, these results were translated from a Spanish-language newspaper. Which means that my former nemeses in Marketing at a U.S. corporation may not have access to the data yet. That’s fine; they loved those GD Focus Group Results so much, I hope they freaking married them.

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If you have yet to settle on a New Year’s Resolution, how about this: Eat more pizza in 2013. I mean, let’s face it, everyone loves pizza. (Hell, one of my friends even got a pizza tattoo on her arm… to match her friend’s pizza tattoo.) Or maybe I’m craving pizza since Turntable Lab’s latest newsletter turned up in my inbox, featuring a brand new deluxe reissue of the Fat Boys self-titled 1984 debut album.

Once a sensation of 1980s culture The Fat Boys were early ambassadors of rap music. Buff Love’s beatbox set the tone for their hard beats and hilarious lyrics. Their subject matter ran that gamut from over-eating to comic book characters and girls. With their innate sense of humor they rightfully earned the title The Clown Princes of Rap. It’s awesome to see The Fat Boys career given its proper due with this more than appropriate pizza box reissue. Includes Pizza Picture disc vinyl housed in its very own Pizza Box, 8-1/2″ x 11″ 20 page booklet and a download card for bonus material and interviews. Recommended for hip hop heads and avid vinyl collectors.

I’ve been a fan of pizza for as long as I can remember, but the Fat Boys were a little bit before my time. A history lesson via YouTube:

They sure don’t make ’em like they used to.

Jokes aside, I’ve been interested to see that purchasing new releases on vinyl typically entitles the buyer to an mp3 download of the album so would-be cratediggers can enjoy their record collection on the go. As such, it seems that labels are reviving the longtime industry practice of adding value to physical products through limited-edition packaging. (Conversely, I’ve also heard that there has been a shift towards making album art more ‘scalable,’ so it remains legible or at otherwise distinctive at small sizes for display.)

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Image via Wikipedia

As we look to 2013, it’s a common practice amongst designers to think about the future of design. The future, indeed, is quite exciting, with 3D printing, open data, green innovation, automated cars and a slew of other new technologies and systems opening the doors for designers to play and create. But as we think about the future of design, I’ve also noticed that 2012 has seen the past creep in to designer’s works in creative ways.

Kyle Bean’s neatly nesting mobile phones

This year, I’ve written about a few projects involving design nostalgia. There were Evan Roth’s popular Solitaire.exe playing cards, an analog throwback to the popular digital game and pre-social media time waster itself inspired by analog playing cards. Kyle Bean put together a set of nesting dolls of mobile phones, shrinking ever forward from the infamous DynaTAC, once a status symbol amongst the wealthy elite and now a laughable relic of the past. Each layer we uncover brings us closer to a future of mobile phone ubiquity while reminding us of the past technologies of their birth.

Austin Yang’s iTypewriter

And looking even further into the past is the iTypewriter, Alan Yang’s wacky mash-up of a physical typewriter with an iPad, which inspired a look at other nostalgic devices developed for iOS devices, which still feel futuristic, from an Atari joystick to the 1984 Mac OS GUI on a Macbook. That particular post prompted a variety of comments: reader C3 bashed it all as “hipster design… cute/ fun/fluff pr/etc,” while Renato Castilho offered a longer critique:

While the concept seems to have been carefully crafted, the very way it takes a forward-looking mobile device (which fits in an envelop [sic]) and makes it bulky, loud and cumbersome should be enough of a reason to shelf it [sic]—let alone the fact that it is by design less useable than the iPad screen or a regular Bluetooth keyboard…

It is certainly amusing, interesting, nostalgic but I can’t really take it seriously. The amount of energy, thinking and effort put into making the new feel (or worse work) like the old could be better applied but hey, at least it assumes, unlike Microsoft’s Surface, that a physical keyboard belongs on a table.

“Electrkobiblioteka” by Walden Wegrzyn

Most revealing is the reflexive nature of many of these projects. Take Walden Wegrzyn’s Electrkobiblioteka, a physical version of an e-book with real paper pages that you can flip and touch. It’s a book of an e-book of a book? And then there’s Jeff Skierka’s Mixtape Table, a throwback to eras when cassette tapes and plywood tables were trés chic. And if music isn’t your thing, you can always turn to Neulant van Exel’s Floppy Table, complete with a sliding compartment a la the classic metal shutter. And what does van Exel suggest we place inside? A remote control for a television, of course.

Neulant van Exel – “Floppy Table”

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