is product design dead?

Surf Board shaper Neil Randall (if6was9) at work

Recently I keep stumbling upon debate about the death of product design, not in terms of definition, a change of name or description, but in terms of people,  it is claimed that product designers will be replaced by computers and machines.  This is not a new debate, but it has got me thinking.  If a computer can generate randomly or selectively, a thousand different skins for a product in a matter of seconds, what need for a designer?  I always took comfort in the slim hope that computers would not be able to understand or incorporate into the design the human aspect we currently take for granted.  For example, I recently watched a program about women designing products for women, with greater understanding than any male could bring to the table.  Could a computer grasp the subtlety that potentially a male designer may not?  Yes a computer could generate aesthetically pleasing exteriors to products, but will it ever be able to link in the human centred design elements that demonstrate the deeper, intangible aspects that humans intuitively bring to their designs.  

A few years ago I visited an old University amigo who was shaping surf boards in Australia.  I spent a few days in his work shop and had a go at shaping a mini board.  Whilst I was able to replicate the shape of a surfboard what i didn't understand was why, because I wasn't a surfer.  He was an excellent surfer and would feel the board and know what an extra millimetre off the thickness would do to the handling, how altering the curve would subtly affect the way the board carves through the water allowing him to tailor the board to an individual or making each board subtly unique.  Having hardly ever surfed, these are things I could not appreciate and thats the thing, products are designed by humans to be used by humans.  

A computer will be able to do subtle things to shapes that I can only imagine, but will it understand the humanity of the reasons why?  Probably not, but I don't think it will need to?  Due to advances in scanners etc in the future a human could walk into a booth (or through an airport) and within seconds the machine would know everything it would need to about that person, their grip strength, how much arthritis they have in their hands, underlying medical problems, their balance etc, then it could print products specifically tailored to their needs and they'd be ready for them to collect on the way home.  It could also monitor sales to work out which objects are aesthetically pleasing to each geographic area, age, sex etc, so that it can produce designs that will have a much higher chance of appealing.  A few years of statistical data build up and advancement in this area and it will probably have us all figured out. Maybe if/when this happens, product design as we know it will be dead, but by that time, based on the teachings of many science fiction films (Terminator, Matrix, I-robot etc) the death of product design and industrial design, will be the least of our problems!

design advice - areas to innovate

When I am designing a product I often only focus on the products relationship with the end user, without realising all the other areas where I can innovate. Products are manufactured, stored, delivered to warehouses, shipped in containers, displayed on shelves, taken home, used and kept in cupboards, cleaned etc.  The life of a product does not begin when the customer opens the packaging.  If I can save weight, materials, number of parts, size (flat pack), storage, ease of part replacement, ease of dis-assembly, then I am making huge cost savings and environmental savings, etc.  There are loads of areas within product design where a designer can make a huge difference, a long time before it has reached the end user and a long time after and all too often I think this is overlooked.

what is industrial design?

There has recently been an interesting discussion on Core77 about trying to define what industrial design is.  Its clear, that at the time of writing, a whole bunch of Industrial designers cannot agree.  Design is such a personal thing and everyones reason for doing it is different.  Some people want to make existing designs look more stlish, some (like myself) want to improve their functionality.

'My industrial design is about identifying a product that doesn't work as well as it could and trying to make it work better.'

But I'm happy to admit, I'm not happy with that definition.

design ideas - don't dredge...Sledge!

Last year I had an idea for modifying trawl doors so that they fished just above the sea bed, reducing destruction to the sea floor, so I made this short video:

Then recently I watched the fantastic Hugh's Fish Fight.  One thing the documentary focuses on is how scallop dredging is destroying habitat and sea life (see video on the fish fight website).  The best way to catch scallops is to hand dive for them, so being a designer and having also recently seen programmes about advances to artificial limbs and computer controlled drones, I started to put things together and came up with the idea of drones with artificial limbs being piloted by computer whiz kids either from the boat or from the shore to harvest scallops.

Is this the future?

But also (thinking around the problem) very few areas are currently zoned off for hand diving only, so better commercial solutions need to be sought for areas where dredging is still allowed.  One piece of behaviour I have seen, is that when the scallop is touched, it's response is to try and flee by propelling itself away:

I wonder if this behaviour can be exploited so by slowly pulling a sledge over a bed of scallops, with dangling ropes at the front of the sledge, they can be tickled/nudged into fleeing and then be collected in the back of the sledge?  This would greatly reduce the damage caused by dredging.

design ideas - newt rescue

image: a newt from my own pond

One of my mates (Andy) works in wildlife conservation, tracking UK populations of amphibians.  On reading my blog post about drains during the flooding, he told me that a big problem our amphibians suffer when migrating to ponds along roads, is falling into drains - they cannot escape and eventually perish.  I came up with some quick ideas to solve this problem that are retrofittable, can be made cheaply and either installed just for the migration seasons or left in place year round.  Concepts focus on either stopping amphibians falling into drains in the first place or providing them with a means of escape when they do (No.5 isn't serious, but if copper dissuades slugs from veg patches will it work on frogs?)....

design hack

I don't know if it's because of the bitterly cold weather we've been having (see previous post), but my bandsaw blades keep breaking.  Rather than throw them out, I decided to recycle broken blades into wood rasps. I initially wanted to fix cut lenghths together with nuts and bolts, but the tempered blades whilst easy to saw, proved impossible to drill through.  Instead I taped all the pieces together and cut a 'V' in each end (with a dremel and grinding wheel) to then hold in a frame.

I also positioned the teeth in opposite directions so I cut material when working the rasp in both directions.  The blades are spaced apart because the teeth of the blades are angled, so with coarse toothed blades, this gives a better cut, but with fine toothed blades this isn't necessary as my second experiment proved.  I am very pleased with the results, they work as well as my current wood working rasp and save me throwing the blades away.

As fine toothed blades don't need to be spaced apart, the ends can just as easily be wrapped in strong tape and then covered with filler or Sugru to make them comfortable to hold.

design ideas - Flooding #2

Alas, the rain continues.... and combined with the wind direction, rain is being blown onto the back door of the house.  This has meant that every time I open the door to go out to my shed to make a model or two, water runs off the door and drips off it's end scribing a perfect arc onto the floor inside.  It's becoming annoying.  I can't believe that door manufacturers haven't come up with a nice cosmetic way to gutter the water off the door to prevent this, which would be an additional USP and could easily be provided as an additional option. 

5 minutes with photoshop provided me with a design solution, a gutter that runs along and extends beyond the edge of the door when open.  I'll admit my modification is not that beautiful (if I spent more time on it I could make it amazing), but even like this, it's better than having to continually lay and change newspaper every time it rains.

design idea - Flooding

This week, the rain in blighty has reached near biblical proportions.  It's autumn and many roads have become flooded as fallen leaves have blocked drains causing several problems.  As a driver, you don't know where the edge of the road is and you also don't know where the drain is if you want to try an unblock it. I was wondering if I could come up with a design solution to solve these issues, so generated two ideas that are cheap to manufacture from plastic and polystyrene and are retrofittable to a current drain.

1. is a float that sits in the drain and as it starts to fill raises to indicate where the drain is. 

2. is an idea to stop the drain blocking by having a floating cage lift up to prevent leaves from clogging the top of the drain.   Both have issues, but are ideas in progress.