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.

Design Ethanography - Brian Loranger

Brian Loranger specialises in methods to find out what people do, how they do it, and, perhaps most importantly, why they do it.

Brian proposed the "top-down" approach to design process. He has an understanding of how a minute problem with a design can compound in to a larger problem, affecting the success of the design. This seemed to me to be the best approach to product design, and although Brian only broached the tip of the iceberg as far as the subject is concerned, I found it very useful.

So what methods can we use to achieve this? Anthropologists often embed themselves in a culture to learn about it, perhaps going to live for months or years with a South American tribe. Designers don't really have time for this, so we have to find other approaches. One vital point is that people's behaviour is changed by your presence - people are not going to behave normally if you sit in the corner of a room with a notebook and record all their actions.

A good example is empathetic development, or putting yourself in the user's situation. Designers at Ford used a suit - developed by anthropologists - to simulate old age, allowing them to better understand how this affects their interaction with a car.

This reminded me of a presentation by Seymour Powell, who showed how they developed products. Rather than asking or interviewing people, they watched them using things. Ask someone if there is anything wrong with their iron, for example, and they will probably say no. But watch them trying to use one, and watch them struggle to fill it up with water through the stupid little hole that all irons seem to have for no discernible reason. Seymour Powell discovered this through observation and designed a product to suit.

But sometimes, interview is the only option available. Brian talked about "grounded theory" and how to use it to get the most from an interview. The idea is to go in to the field without much knowledge - that way you don't develop any preconceived ideas. Go out, observe and then develop focus questions. The idea is to ask only a few generalised questions - open, not closed, to get a wholistic viewpoint. Minimise note taking as well - use recording technology so you can focus on interviewing rather than writing. 

I found Brian's lecture very interesting and will no doubt find his methods useful now and in future projects.

Cheaply made, or made to be cheap?

So, I've been thinking about my study for my end of semester project. I was thinking about the difference between cheaply made products, and products that are made to be cheap. What does that mean? Well, I'm interested in the design of the product. There are two ways to make a product cheaper to produce:

1. Use the cheapest materials and the cheapest methods. This almost certainly will result in something rubbish that won't last and is ultimately a waste of resources. The standard made-in-China McDonald's toy.

2. Very carefully and intelligently design the product to be cheap to make. Design it to work well with cheaper materials; minimise the material needed; design for cheaper tooling; design for less waste. The list goes on.

I will be looking in to this topic further to see what examples I can find.

The Aesthetics of Technology

This week Hugh Pizey talked to us about the aesthetics of technology - does form follow function?

2001 - A Space Odyssey

Ben Craven - Magnitudes

This week, we had Ben Craven providing a very interesting lecture on gauging the feasibility of ideas. Often it is hard to get a scale of something - for example, how much does it cost? Precise numbers may be difficult to work out, but sometimes you can work out a good estimate - is it £100 or £100,000?

The point here is to start to put numbers in to an idea to quickly find out if the idea is feasible or not. Ben pointed out how he has seen final year students nearing the end of a project who still don't have a vague idea if their idea is feasible or not!

Exact numbers are not needed - usually educated guesses will give and answer at least in the right order of magnitude.

Example - can we get power from closing filing cabinet drawers?

Let's assume that the drawer weighs 20kg (this is being deliberately optimistic.)

Let's say the drawer moves at 1m/s.

Using Ke = 0.5*m*v^2 gives 10J per drawer close.

Let's assume (optimistically again) that the drawer is closed every 5 minutes for 8 hours every day. This is about 100 times per day, so the total energy is 10J*100 = 1kJ.

Dividing this by the time in a day gives a power output of 0.01W.

So even with optimistic assumptions, and assuming that the process was 100% efficient, we still get a useless power output, and the idea is not viable.

It works the other way too - if you use pessimistic assumptions and still get good results, the idea is likely to be viable.

Ben also raised the point of the difference between accuracy and precision:
Accuracy is how close you are to the actual answer;
Precision is the "smallness" of the units used.

Using the same techniques, the class worked out approximate values for a wide variety of things in the lecture. These included the number of breaths taken in a year, the mass of 1km of road and the steps taken to walk 100 miles. More worryingly, the area of land needed to grow enough biomass to power the UK worked out to be roughly the same as the area of the UK. Similarly, we would need to cover all of the land of the UK with wind turbines if we were to power the country with them alone, and this still probably wouldn't be enough.

Overall this was a fascinating and useful lecture in how to see if an idea will work - an extremely useful tool for a product design engineer.

Marc Newson - Urban Spaceman

This week we watched a BBC documentary about Marc Newson, designer of everything from chairs to space planes.

Newson is unusual in the in the world of famous designers in that he doesn't have a particular style or language running through his work. Dieter Rams, by contrast, has a very specific design philosophy, making his work instantly recognisable. Newson's peices are designed mainly on an individual basis, with clear inspirations for each design.

Take, for example, one of Newson's first designs after leaving art college - the obligatory chair.

The Lockheed Lounge was born out of hacking away at foam to produce a flowing form, and then covering it with aluminium sheets. Newson had originally envisaged a smooth, seamless form, like a blob of liquid metal, but didn't have the means to achieve it. Instead he took inspiration from aircraft manufacture and attached the sheet metal using blind rivets. The result is a design that has evolved from an initial inspiration, and has since gone on to sell for more than £1M. However, with this piece Newson has fulfilled the "designer" stereotype and made an entirely useless object. Owners of these chairs say that they are uncomfortable, weak and that they use them primarily to hang things on. So is this good or successful design? I suspect that I would fail my degree if, for my final year design project, I produced an inherently simple object that failed to fulfill any of its basic functions and yet still managed to look as spectacularly ugly as the Lockheed Lounge.

The theme continues in much of Newson's other work; he has designed many things (a lot of them are seats of some form) that are impractical or useless. Newson designed the interior of a proposed "space plane" project that never took off. He designed seats that are perpendicular to the direction of travel, with a pivot so that the passenger is always level as the plane pitches upwards. Unfortunately, Newson failed to consider the practicalities of this from and engineering point of view. The pivots have no dampers, so the seats will rock violently from side to side during flight. During the zero G push over at the peak of the flight, there is nothing to stop the seat turning completely upside down and continuing to rotate. Newson states that "refined engineering is beautiful," but seems to lack any grasp of basic engineering concepts.

So are Newson's designs all conceptual, all impractical? Surprisingly, no. He has designed some more impractical furniture from marble, but accquired knowledge of the material by using it. He has then gone on to design a shoe boutique made entirely from leather, glass and marble. He was also Creative Director at Qantas Airlines, and is responsible for the complete design of everything the customer interacts with - from the lounge to the aircraft interior. For once, Newson managed to get a chair right, and designed a well thought out solution to aircraft seating, which, unusually for him, actually considers the user experience. Perhaps this stems from the fact that his favourite place to design is on an aeroplane, so he has spent a lot of time as the user himself. Perhaps this success is also due to the rest of Newson's team - he supplies the conceptual design, and they are tasked with making it a working reality.

Ultimately, designers like Marc Newson are neccessary. Someone needs to challenge the norm and come up with conceptual ideas born from unusual inspirations. But good design is design that fulfills a purpose - the Oxford definition of a chair is "a thing made or used for sitting on." How can you claim to have designed a chair if it can't be sat on?

Week One - The demise of skilled manufacturing?

Our first lecture was on the demise of skilled manufacturing with Craig Whittet. Craig proposed the idea that skilled manufacturing is sadly a declining craft.

But why is this?

Is it because people don't value high quality products as much any more? Is it that they don't value skillfully produced products, instead being happy with more modern mechanised manufacturing? Perhaps people don't value skilled workers themselves? Do people actually know or care at all how a product is manufactured, or are they more interested in the object itself? Or it it just that skilled workers are hard to come by, as people are attracted to other careers?

The first case study we looked at was Manolo Blahnik -http://www.manoloblahnik.com/ .  He designs highly sought-after shoes, with a typical price of £875. These shoes are made with highly skilled labour in China - a country where that £875 would be many months' wages for a typical skilled worker. Surely the high price of the finished product implies that at least a few people care about skilfully hand-made shoes. But is this contradicted by the apparently low value attributed to the people who make them - by the company and perhaps the customer as well?

Similar points are raised with Tricker's, a  UK family owned shoe brand. http://www.trickers.com/  Their shoes range from around £250 up to £6000 for custom-made products. Clearly Tricker's produce a range of shoes within a reasonable price range for a lot of people, certainly many more than Blahnik's do. So again, this suggests that people do want - and are prepared to pay for - the products of skilled manufacturing.

Perhaps the low wages associated with an apprenticeship are the cause of the decline. While the minimum wage for an unskilled job are around £6/hour, the wages for an apprenticeship in to a skilled job are less than half that. This is bound to put some people off - but I'm not being paid at all to go to university. I'm actually paying a lot to be here! So surely if people were interested in skilled manufacturing, and if it had a promising future, they would be willing to invest in their future. Maybe that does suggest that people simply don't value skilled jobs - so is it a social issue?

As a final point, Brooks Saddles (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9w-y24Waz4) were recently bought out by an Italian company. Brooks, once the world's largest manufacturer of bicycle saddles, were in debt, but the Italians recognised the value in the tradition and legacy of the products. Their products are once again in high demand, and are produced "in the hands of those who posses an unequalled experience in their work."

Perhaps skilled manufacturing is making a comeback.