Designer investigation - Charles and Ray Eames

Charles and Ray Eames - a husband and wife partnership responsible for some of the most important furniture of the 20th century, as well as toys, puzzles, films, exhibitions and even buildings.

The couple started by building wooden leg splints in the spare room of their rented apartment in Los Angeles. A year later, the US Navy ordered 5000, and they moved to a larger workshop - and so began the next 40 years of iconic work.

The Eames carried out a lot of research and work in plywood, developing sculptures, chairs, tables and toy animals from the material. All of their plywood products combine simple, clean, organic aesthetics with true pioneering design and technical ingenuity.

After plywood, the Eames started looking in to alternative materials - plastic, aluminium and even fibreglass. In 1956, they developed the Lounge Chair, in leather and plywood.

This Lounge Chair become something of a status symbol - no self respecting executive could go without one. I think it is testament to the design that this chair looks modern today, 60 years after it was designed. I can also say, having sat in one at the Lighthouse in Glasgow, that they are unbelievably comfortable!

Perhaps one of the couple's most iconic and recognisable desigsn are their DSR and DSW chairs.

Designed in 1948, these are another example of timeless design. In fact, on a recent visit to McDonald's, I spotted these chairs being used in the restaurant!

Again this is testament to the Eames' design - here we have chairs designed in the 1940s that still look great and are strong enough for use in a modern fast food restaurant.

Having said that, I also find it a little sad. Here is a classic design icon placed in a fast food restaurant with wipe-clean faux wood walls and pointless plastic toys. It seems a shame that such an important piece of design should be lumped in with all the other mediocrity in McDonald's.

Or perhaps it is a good thing. Maybe Charles and Ray Eames would be happy that their 70 year old design is being enjoyed and used by people around the world on a daily basis.

Another point before I finish. The Eames' are highly regarded as some of the most important designers of the 20th century. But why? Yes, their furniture is iconic and beautiful, but does that make it important? The world has lots of furniture, and ultimately a chair is only for sitting on. Can we really hold up a designer as a great achiever for designing something that ultimately gave no benefit to the world? Or is it of huge benefit to the world? Is the design of ordinary objects, their refinement, the enjoyment that people get from looking at them and using them, vital to us as people, and what defines civilization? I'll let you think about that one.

Caterham Seven 160

A recent episode of Top Gear featured the new Caterham Seven 160 - lightweight motoring exemplified. This is a sub-500kg car powered by an engine little bigger than that in the original Fiat 500 or Citroen 2CV - yet it handles brilliantly and does 0-60mph in only 6.5 seconds. Why isn't there a four or five-seater equivalent? 

Minimalist car design

I've looked further into what is actually needed to make a car - the bare minimum of parts, and I've found a few interesting things.

This is the 1937 Citroen 2CV prototype, an excellent example of intelligent, minimalist design. It has a hand start, only one light, removable seats and aluminium bodywork. The bonnet is corrugated because the designers realised that they could make the panel both stiffer and lighter by doing so. It weighs just 450kg - compare that to the Nissan Quashquai at over 2000kg. The 2CV is as simple as a car can be - everything has been designed purely with function in mind.

Here is a great video showing the virtues of the 2CV:

Director of Glasgow School of Art - Tom Inns

This week we had a lecture by the new director of the School of Art, Professor Tom Inns. He spoke about his own history, first as an engineer and then a designer, and we discussed the subject of product development and strategies.

One of the most interesting things he brought up was the rate of product success - apparently only 56% of all products released by companies are successful. So realistically, I could expect half of everything I design to be a waste of time!

Some companies, of course, have much higher rates of success. Apple, for example, are successful in virtually everything they do these days. But even they make a mess of it sometimes. 

This is the Apple Newton. Apple invested around $100 million in the development of the Newton, but missed its goal to attempt to reinvent personal computing. The project fell victim to project slippage, scope creep and a growing fear that it would interfere with the new Macintosh, and was cancelled in 1998.

This just goes to show how careful we must be as designers, putting a huge amount of money and effort in to something that ultimately may not be successful as a product. 

Intelligent design?

Following my trip to Nissan and my concerns over how much material goes in to a modern car, I started looking in to the old Fiat 500 and found this - a very interesting comparison between old and new. 60 years separate these cars, yet the original actually uses slightly less fuel than the new one. Is this right? Can we really call this progress, or intelligent design? Why do we carry all this stuff around in cars all the time? What is the minimum that is actually needed to make a car? To be continued...

Visit to Nissan, Sunderland

This week we visited Nissan's enormous car manufacturing plant in Sunderland. This was a fascinating insight in to the systems and processes behind mass manufacture of cars.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was the time that it took to do a job. Every single job that needed done - whether it was putting in the seats or installing the engine - took 59 seconds. This was vital to the flow of the continuous production line and the efficient manufacture of the cars. I can't even imagine the level of thought that must have gone in to the design to both make parts that work as intended AND can be fitted in less than a minute. 

Interestingly, though, despite all of the clever design done back at the office, some of the simplest innovations were made by the factory workers themselves. For example, workers used to have to carry a heavy tool belt with all they required to attach parts to the car as it moved along the line. A worker came up with the idea of a tool rack that can slide along a rail, minimising the weight that workers have to carry. I have to say that I was surprised that nobody had thought of it before, given the level of ingenuity in virtually everywhere else. 

I was also interested in the sheer amount of stuff that went in to a car. The bodyshell was inherently light - a person could easily pick up a whole side of a car. So why does a Nissan Quashqai weigh over two tonnes?! A lot of it seemed to be just stuff really. Electric everything, plastic everything. The dashboard in particular was an absolutely massive piece of plastic, too heavy for a worker to lift - unlike the main structural parts of the car!

So it got me thinking. Nissan Sunderland produces more than 500,000 cars a year. If each weighs on average 1500kg (a conservative estimate) then just that one plant is using 750,000,000kg of materials every year. Seven hundred and fifty MILLION kilograms. And Nissan have 40 manufacturing facilities worldwide. It struck me that designers have a huge responsibility when dealing with products on this scale and magnitude. By saving just one kilo on each car, just the Sunderland plant alone would save half a million kilograms of resources. By saving 500 kg per car - not impossible, family cars in the past averaged below 1000 kg - Nissan would save an incredible 2,551,489,500kg of materials, based on their global sales for 2013. That's over two and a half BILLION kilgrams of materials that have been dug up, refined, transported, manufactured in to a car, transported again, and then dragged around everywhere the cars drive for the rest of their working lives. It then all has to be disposed of too! 

I realised that this was serious. How come in the 1950s we could produce family cars that weighed a quarter of what a Quashquai does? There have been advances in safety and performance, granted, but there have also been advances in materials, engine technology and manufacturing methods. Why can't we be as frugal with materials as we once were, particularly in the day of real environmental concern?  

Colour - the Science behind the sense - Ben Craven

This week we had another fascinating lecture by Ben Craven, this time on colour and how we see it. He started off by pointing out that we are all in fact colour blind! There is actually no objective reality to colour - animals and humans all see colour in a different way, and none of them are the "correct" view of the world.

So how are we colour blind? Our eyes use three types of colour detecting cells. They each detect light from a different area of the spectrum, each giving the strongest signal for their particular area. The brain then compares results from all the cell types to work out what colour something is.

This also means that we can easily be tricked. Look at the image below:

It shows a red pen in a box. The box is split on to two compartments, each with apparently identical lights. But the lights are not actually the same. One is from a yellow light; the other is a mixture of red and green, which we see as yellow. As a result, the pen looks different under these two different - but apparently identical - lights. Under the red/green light, the pen looks red, as there is red light to reflect off it. Under the purely yellow light, there is no red to reflect off the pen, so it looks grey and dark.

 Ben demonstrated this principle to great effect with a red pepper during the demonstration. Under one light the pepper looked unbelievably vivid - both the red fruit and the green stalk. But under the other light, the pepper actually looked black!

All of this was a fascinating and important insight in to how we see colour and how important the light is to what we see.