Good design will save the world, right after Rock & Roll

In the old days, at the start of the electronics revolution in healthcare, we would design products in our studios in Europe, making timeless designs that would last for years and years. We would consult customers, patients, doctors, and make products with human-centered designs. Products were judicious, well thought and made to answer a specific need. We would then fight with factories in Taiwan and China to have the products made exactly as we wanted them.

The balance of design-power has changed, and it is not necessarily a good thing. I have been working with Chinese manufacturing concerns for the last 25 years and over two decades have noticed some radical changes in design practices in China. At the beginning of the century, towards 2003, there was a mass-globalization of home-medical devices (such as thermometers, blood pressure monitors and nebulizers), when they started entering the mass-market.

In many ways this introduced a trend that shortened the lifespan of products and that changed medical devices into loss leaders. Medical devices were used to attract customers: “Come to (insert name of supermarket chain here) and buy a blood pressure monitor for US$9,99 (and at the same time do the rest of your shopping…).

This radically changed the lifespan of product designs, because every year the supermarket chains wanted newer, better, faster, cheaper models, with more and more interesting features. So for 10 years in China, most medical engineers, instead of focusing on technology developments, concentrated on making more and more different designs. So there is now a plethora of designs available for medical devices, but is it sufficient?

China is not yet really producing good designs, in the sense that they are still obsessed with the idea of making stuff look good rather than focusing on the careful balance between form and function. Indeed, design for design’s sake is meaningless, as it does not serve any purpose.

Designed in Heaven, Made in China…

So what is good design? 

Everything is designed, one-way or another. Some objects are designed well, while others are not; some are designed pretentiously, others unassumingly; some are designed to optimize materials and techniques, while others are wasteful; some are approachable and understandable, others trade on their unattainability. Design takes them all in, from chandeliers to pencils, from airplanes to computer screens, from the interior of a theater to the receipt at a department store's checkout. While some objects naturally attract our attention for their extraordinary character and desirability - an eccentric and expensive pair of sneakers, for instance, or a gleaming sports car - many others are so apparently ordinary as to go unnoticed. Every day we use dozens of them, from elastic bands to Band-Aids, erasers, and mascara wands. If they work well, chances are we won't pay them much attention. However, in spite of their modest price and demure presence, some of these things are true masterpieces of the art of design and deserve our unconditional admiration.

Most everyday objects, like paper clips or bubble wrap, speak of the timeless role of craftsmanship, the timeliness of innovation, and the continuous guidance that material culture can provide. They are anonymous designs in that we often do not know the name of the person who drew them up. Some of them are of exceptional quality, affordable, and universal. They are so good, we could not imagine living without them. And still, we take them for granted. The moment we decide to become acquainted with them, a whole new universe opens up. Each object comes with a story that begins with its conception and does not end until it is destroyed or recycled, a life cycle whose narrative can be as captivating as a biography.

The story of some objects, chopsticks and dice for example, is lost in time and we can still today lose ourselves in the contemplation of their perfect balance between form and function, their sensitive and sensible use of materials, the way they express the ancient culture that generated them. When an object is well designed, to the trained eye it seems to glow from the inside, proud of how well it performs the function it was intended for and of how effortless it makes everything seem. We are all design experts, even if some of us do not know it. Look around in your home... Once you learn to recognize patterns of beauty in pragmatic and economic ideas, you will realize that your homes are filled with masterpieces.

Can a simple pencil be considered as a work of art? 

Everybody has heard of the infamous Space Pen.

Space has its urban legends of course, and the Million Dollar Space Pen is one of the more enduring ones. It is neither as outlandish nor as unbelievable as the story about faking the Moon landings, and even though it seems more credible than a massive government conspiracy, it is probable that fewer people have heard it.

The story goes like this: in the 1960s, NASA astronauts discovered that their pens did not work in zero gravity. So like good engineers, they went to work and designed a wonder pen. It worked upside down. It worked in vacuum. It worked in zero gravity. It even worked underwater! And it only cost a million dollars!

At the same time, the Russians were ramping up their efforts to conquer space before the Americans, and they also realized that their normal pens did not work in space…

So the crafty Russians used a pencil...

Whether this story is true or not, it does highlight the marvelous and timeless design of a simple object: the pencil.

In 1565, a sticky black substance thought to be lead was found underneath an uprooted tree in the Cumberland hills of the United Kingdom. People began to use it to write erasable marks by inserting it into a rough wooden holder. In the late eighteenth century, the Swedish Chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele identified the material as a crystalized form of carbon and named it graphite after the Greek word "graphein", which means, "to write".

In 1760, a German cabinetmaker, Kaspar Faber, founded his eponymous company near Nuremberg, opening his first pencil shop in 1761. His first pencils were composed of narrow sticks of graphite mixed with sulfur and glued between two pieces of wood.

Over the years the various technologies for writing have evolved tremendously, but no innovation has yet managed to dethrone the centuries old design of a piece of graphite held by a piece of wood.
Why is that? Well it's quite simple... Good design is generally a combination of different qualities, with two main qualities that stand out: what it does, and what it looks like. A good object has to deliver, if not full-fledged function, then at least an emotion, some information, a hint of a meaning.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve Jobs

Some objects manage to deliver all of the above. But sometimes, the mere function of an object can make that object so indispensable that it becomes integrated into our daily routines and is thus assimilated as a design object.

That is the pencil...

China has a long way to go.

Uwe Diegel
www.medactiv.com
uwediegel@mac.com