Hasta La Ideas

As industrial designers, we’re probably pickier than most about the objects we own. We become conscious of badly-placed buttons, poor ergonomics and shoddy construction in ways the average consumer may not. In this series I’ll look at the specific objects I choose to use most often, and examine them as if they were the subject of a design research project.

First up, my not-a-wallet wallet, which is actually a Japanese train pass holder.

Purpose of Object: Carry credit cards and driver’s license only. Cash and receipts go in my pockets, which get emptied every night to file the latter.

Price paid: I think it was 95 Yen–about a buck–in 1998.

Why did you choose this object over competing objects?
1) It’s thin. It had to be not bulky, yet carry my five EDC cards (Driver’s license, banking card, two credit cards and my ZipCar pass). I hate that back pocket wallet bulge and don’t know how people comfortably drive cars and sit on the subway like that.

2) It’s fast to use. It had to allow me to quickly remove and re-insert a card. As an impatient New Yorker I can’t stand being that guy that holds up the line.

Story behind this object:
I bought my first while living in Japan in 1998 to hold my train pass. Everyone I knew in Tokyo used them. The trains in Japan are as efficient as the passengers; the design of the pass holder allows you to quickly slide your monthly train pass out to insert into the turnstile, which opens to admit you while spitting your pass back out at the top, where you retrieve it and slide it back into the holder. Everyone did this smoothly.

Tokyo train stations are unbelievably crowded—it’s one of the most population-dense cities in the world—but the crowds flow well and efficiently. I truly believe that if everyone in Tokyo carried their train pass in a flip-out wallet, the citywide transit times would slow down.

I didn’t carry my U.S. driver’s license or credit cards while living in Japan, as I had no use for the former and believe it or not, it wasn’t common to use credit cards in 1990s Japan. Everyone used cash. But upon returning to the ‘States, I found the train pass holder would perfectly fit the few credit cards I needed to carry, and was a lot less bulky than a wallet. I’ve been using it ever since, occasionally replacing them as they wear out. On return trips to Japan I’ve bought a stack of the cheap things.

Stateside, Muji sells something similar (more on that below).

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Digsmed was the name of a tableware manufacturer from Denmark, and lately I’ve stumbled across a rash of their items manufactured in the 1960s. Sold by secondhanders on Etsy, eBay and elsewhere online, Digsmed seems to have gotten a couple of basic things very right–a rotating wooden circle attached to an unseen base, and a glassblowing operation–and adapted those things into a beautiful line of Lazy Susans and spice racks made from teak.

Here’s what must have been their flagship product, an 18-jar number that was for sale on Etsy:

As you can see, the wooden caps to the jars are permanently affixed to their spokes. You rotate the jar you want to the six o’clock position, then unscrew it, leaving the cap where it is.

I like that design because it means you’ll never misplace the cap.

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“In our modern society, it’s next to impossible to find long-haul products,” writes Scott Hofert. And he should know; his job in the non-profit sector required him to travel the world from 1989 to the 2000s, and during off-hours he sought out new specimens for his collection of leather bags while traipsing through 40-odd countries. But what he found was that most of these so-called durable goods were not up to snuff. “[They] were flimsy, cheesy or had so many pockets and compartments when all [I] wanted was something simple, rugged and durable.”

North-Carolina-based Hofert then embarked on the path that will get you written up in Core77: He scanned the product landscape, could not find what he wanted, and decided to learn how to make what he wanted by himself, using his own hands.

What sparked Hofert’s journey is interesting. In April of 2010 the first iPad came out, and Hofert bought one. The iPad had of course been a top-secret project at Apple, and upon its release there weren’t a lot of cases available for it. Hofert got himself a scrap of leather hide and decided to make one of his own. He asked questions at a local leather shop and scoured YouTube for videos on how to work leather. After some trial and error, he had successfully produced the simple iPad case you see here:

“It was real simple,” Hofert told Core77. “Square edges, clean lines.” Now that he knew how to make it, he thought other iPad owners might want one, so he started a website to sell them online. He also shrewdly took out an ad in a magazine for Mac users. The risk was low: If someone wanted one, he’d run out and buy the leather, then make it and ship it. Hofert’s instincts proved correct, and orders started coming in.

Having caught the leather-crafting bug, Hofert then turned his efforts towards making a leather wallet. More trial and error, and after he got it right, that went up on the website too. Orders started coming in for that as well. He followed that up with a belt and then finally, the thing that had drawn him to leather in the first place, a leather bag.

We all have our product fetishes, and I asked Hofert what it was that drew him to leather bags in the first place. “I’d travel through all these airports,” Hofert says, “and you’d see some guy on an escalator with this beat-up leather bag. You’d just know, by looking at that bag, that that guy’d been everywhere with it. Something about that drew me to them. I love the idea that you can have a product that gets better with age, like a wine.”

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This week Axor unveiled their latest line of faucets, the Starck Organic collection. Designed by you-know-who, the curvy, branch-like forms were nature inspired and include faucets for sinks, tubs and showers.

You’re probably wondering how the heck they work. The top knob controls the temperature, while the spout is actually a second knob that controls the water flow. The assymetrical design seems to favor righties, and splitting up those tasks will seem strange to some of us (including your correspondent), but both Axor and Starck have put heavy philosophy-time into the line (whether or not we think they need it). “The innovative control concept allows us to experience our approach to water more consciously,” the company writes–italics theirs.

To build hype for the Organic’s launch this week, Axor shot and earlier released some rather…mysterious videos of Starck making abstract references to the product. Here’s one of them that had me scratching my head:

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“Chicks dig rock stars” was the conclusion we high school boys drew early on. We’d all seen old TV footage of girls going nuts at Elvis and The Beatles concerts, and we couldn’t help but notice that otherwise unremarkable guys we knew that were in local rock bands had no problem attracting mates.

The phenomenon of putting on creative displays that result in sexual attraction exists in the animal kingdom, of course; we all know about preening peacocks and strutting turkeys. But with animals it seems to run one way, with males being demonstrative to woo females.

With humans I think it runs in both directions. The reason we never said “Guys dig female rocks stars” was because none of my buddies and I followed female-fronted bands. But years later I was at Maxwell’s—something like Hoboken’s version of CBGB’s—at an Asobi Seksu gig. When the diminutive, otherwise unremarkable female frontwoman hit the stage and started belting it out, I had a Wayne’s World camera-zoom moment and understood the phenomenon at once. The singer can look like a mess, hair all wild, thrashing around and sweating through her T-shirt, but when she opens her mouth and that sound comes out, the rest of the room falls away.

I bring all this up because I’ve just seen the most astonishing example of a creative mating display ever—if it’s real. The needle on my hoax meter is moving but I hope it’s a false positive. Take a look at this:

This underwater, sand-based version of a crop circle was spotted by underwater photographer Yoji Ookata in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, 80 feet below sea level. It’s about 6.5 feet in diamater. Ookata had twenty years of diving experience and had never seen anything like it. And no one he showed the photos to knew what the hell it was.

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