Strong geometric shapes, tall readable x-height and a clean uniform line quality are what contribute to Gotham’s unapologetic, industrial and unmistakably American presence. Its letters look like steel girders, machine-bent and joined together.
Gotham had successfully revived a style established in the early 20th century, marrying the geometric qualities of Futura (1927) with the self-effacing clarity of Helvetica (1957) to become the archetypal American sans-serif typeface of the 21st century.
But something else was happening. Another revolution in typography started taking root around the time of Obama’s election, a revolution spurred by two technology trends: the rise of high density displays and growing support for custom fonts on the web.
After over 20 years of working with a handful of web-safe fonts that included Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia and Times New Roman, web designers were champing at the bit to bring new typefaces to the web. Yet, until H&FJ released their Cloud Typography service in mid-2013, the most popular font of our time simply couldn’t be licensed for web use.
And just like that, an unlikely hero emerged.
Proxima Nova, the creation of respected type designer Mark Simonson became the ubiquitous standard of contemporary web typography. Released in 2005, and available via the popular web font hosting service Typekit, Proxima Nova is the American sans-serif typeface that we read daily on BuzzFeed, Spotify, Instagram and nearly every new startup website.
Proxima Nova is a quirkier adaptation of the American Gothic style, less straight-laced than Gotham, with friendlier circular punctuation, tightened kerning and distinctive characters such as the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘f’ that add a welcoming tone to body copy. More on that from Cameron Moll’s excellent oral history of the font.
It can’t be understated that the adoption of Proxima Nova was also facilitated by its exceptional hinting instructions. As the transition to high-resolution screens slowly makes its way to the desktop, particularly via mainstream entrants such as the new Retina iMac, there remains a need for web fonts to also perform well on standard LCD displays across a wide variety of rendering engines (especially Microsoft ClearType). In other words, Proxima Nova can be used at small sizes and looks good on nearly any device.
But with all the homage I can pay to Gotham and Proxima Nova, my heart belongs to Alright Sans—Jackson Cavanaugh’s take on the American Gothic. Released in 2009, I’ve designed with Alright Sans almost every day since, using it to build every bit of packaging and UI for Lumi, my personal sites and Edgemade. I can’t get over how beautiful it looks on a retina screen.
For me, Alright Sans is a triumph in the tightrope walk of typography. While Gotham and Proxima Nova rely on their square, perfectly geometric letterforms to impose confidence, they compromise on density and legibility, especially at text sizes and in tabular data. The characters are simply too wide to be functional for many applications, which is why Gotham Narrow is pitched as the text face of choice in the Gotham family. Alright Sans manages the difficult task of retaining strong geometry, while forming tighter, more humanist, more readable paragraphs. It is licensed for web use by Webtype, an underdog compared to Typekit and Hoefler, but full of underrated, beautiful typefaces.
I don’t expect Alright Sans to take on the mantle of America’s next archetypal sans-serif—in fact, I believe Gotham and Proxima Nova will share that honor for the foreseeable future. Alright Sans points to the current renaissance in typography stimulated by advancements in technology, a golden age of typography. If anything ends the battle for the next archetype of American sans-serif, it won’t be a specific font—it will be the proliferation of incredible independent foundries such as Cavanaugh’s Okay Type. Death by a thousand cuts.
]]>I find myself wondering what Magellan would think if you presented him Google Maps running on a phone. The entire world mapped in detail, with photos of every building in every city.
I sat in an airport listening to Tchaikovsky on Spotify, wondering what he’d think if he knew that anyone can listen to high-fidelity recordings of all his compositions. Just a phone and a pair of earbuds—no matter where you are.
What if Gutenberg could hold the world’s knowledge in the palm of his hands, and search Wikipedia for anything he could think of?
Imagine showing Nicéphore Niépce and the Lumière brothers what images they could capture from a camera that fits in your pocket.
And of course, Alexander Graham Bell. Who would have thought that anyone on earth could wirelessly have a face-to-face conversation with nearly anyone else?
Within ten seconds, I can tell you what the weather will be like tomorrow or what the top five restaurants are, for any city in the world. I can have a chauffeur here in 5 minutes, or have my groceries delivered before dinner.
In our pockets is a portal to powers that even kings couldn’t dream of.
]]>Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s just something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another. It’s finding the right balance between two competing desires.
Which compromises you make—now that’s a different question.
Companies (and often politicians) like to tout their decisions as “uncompromising” or having “no compromises”. Plainly, this is impossible. Once you’ve decided on an approach, you’ve inherently decided against a number of other approaches.
A particularly poignant example came from 2011, when Microsoft launched the Surface tablet as a “no compromise” product that allowed users to run both the classic Windows operating system alongside their new touch-based OS. In one of the launch articles, Microsoft’s ex-head of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, repeats
“Our design goal was clear: no compromises. If you want to, you can seamlessly switch between Metro style apps and the improved Windows desktop.”
Obviously, this decision significantly compromised the performance and ease-of-use of the product. Journalists had a field day with Microsoft’s wording.
Recently, my ears tingled when Pebble launched what has now become the most successful crowd-funded product in history: its new smart watch. As the headline states, Pebble Time is an “Awesome Smartwatch, No Compromises”.
I’m not here to throw Pebble under the bus. Quite the opposite. I admire the product they launched. In fact, I admire it for its compromises.
Pebble Time’s biggest compromise is its e-paper display. A decision dear to my heart as I hope to see the technology continue to flourish. Because e-paper requires much less power than LCD or OLED screens, Pebble Time can function, always on, for 7 days on a single battery charge. Contrast that with Apple Watch, which only lasts 18 hours with its OLED screen. What’s more, e-paper performs much better in direct sunlight.
Now of course, Apple wouldn’t be using OLED if e-paper didn’t come with its own compromises. E-paper doesn’t match the “retina” resolution Apple desires, making text noticeably pixelated on the Pebble Time. The color reproduction has a much narrower gamut, making photographs look muted, and the refresh rate of e-paper is also lower, meaning that animations aren’t as smooth.
I find these compromises acceptable, if not better suited to a watch.
The reason companies like to vilify compromise is that being opinionated inherently exposes your approach to a set of weaknesses. The stronger your opinion, the more you compromise something else, the clearer your weaknesses are. Companies don’t like to expose weaknesses, because they worry about scaring away customers.
An 18-hour battery life is absolutely pitiful given that most watches can last years without maintenance or a new battery. But Apple doesn’t try to hide that flaw behind the banner of “no compromise”. In fact, Apple takes pride in its decision-making, as illustrated by their design philosophy: “one thousand no’s for every yes”.
Unlike Microsoft, which took a middle-of-the-road approach, Pebble made a strong decision. Pebble bet on a technology it knew Apple wouldn’t use, and created a distinct, opinionated product. And that’s how Pebble took back its crown as highest grossing Kickstarter campaign. They should take pride in the compromises they chose.
There is more power in what you say ‘no’ to than what you say ‘yes’ to.
Personally, I prefer using the word trade-off than compromise. It better conveys the relationship between strengths and weaknesses. You are trading a weakness for a strength.
Good design is opinionated. Making something great is making the right compromises for the people who will use it.
]]>A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of Automatic where I met co-founder Ljuba Miljkovic. They are the makers of a clever system for monitoring your car using an app and a small device that plugs into the OBD port. We get into its benefits and how they brought it to market.
Ljuba and I also dig into the challenges of bringing tech products to retail, especially how to approach designing point-of-purchase displays. Automatic can already be found at Apple Stores and Best Buy, but as software enters every part of our lives we discuss what retailers such as Home Depot are doing to keep up.
Finally, we end with a few ideas around the future of cars. With major companies vying for various parts of the car experience (Apple, Google, Uber, Lyft, etc), and excitement around the self-driving car, we ask ourselves on what time scale these changes will take place. I was reminded of the Max Planck quote: "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." We can only hope it will be faster than that.
Additional links:
My guest on this episode is Nick Evans, the founder of Tile. Tile is making an elegant Bluetooth-powered tracker that helps you find lost items.
While the idea is simple, executing it with this level of polish and minimalism is always a challenge. On the show we discuss some of the decisions that led to Tile's industrial design, as well as the challenges of crowd-funding the project via a self-hosted campaign. We compare some of the pros and cons of Kickstarter versus options such as Tilt and Selfstarter.
Nick and I also chat about FCC regulations, and what we hope to see from carriers as the internet of things develops. Amazon's Whispernet is an early example of how devices like the e-ink Kindle can benefit from low-bandwidth connections. Opening up such a network to startups would have a profound impact on the types of devices that can be designed.
Finally, our conversation was also an opportunity to discuss some of the new collaborations Tile is launching, such as their integration with Blunt Umbrellas.
Brent Bushnell, co-founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus is my guest on this episode. One of the most prolific entrepreneurs and tinkerers I know, Brent has been creating interactive installations for years and has assembled them into a travelling carnival that kicks off next month in Los Angeles (tickets are still available).
We retrace Brent’s childhood growing up with his father Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s, and how that inspired his mission to reinvigorate STEAM education at Two Bit Circus.
Along the way, Brent has been involved in many amazing projects, developing early touch-based interactive technology with the restaurant chain uWink, as well as installations for the LA-based event series Mindshare, making a giant Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go and other incredible machines during his time at Syyn Labs.
This was an incredibly fun conversation. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.
One more aspect of current display technology I failed to point out is touch latency. This video by Albert Ng and Paul Dietz of Microsoft Research highlights the problem concisely and begins to offer a path forward. Simply put, most touchscreen devices suffer from a 100 millisecond delay between the input from your finger and the visual feedback on-screen. For applications like sketching, it’s abysmal.
At the iPhone announcement, Steve Jobs famously bashed the stylus—a moment I discussed with FiftyThree’s hardware team on the podcast. For most situations he was right, a touchscreen-optimized operating system shouldn’t depend on a stylus. But there’s a reason architects don’t call finger painting their medium of choice (insert Frank Gehry joke). Sketching, painting and drafting all involve tools that make our fingers more precise, more expressive, different.
The evolution of displays is clearly on a path to more paper-like experiences. What are attributes of paper that we still need to solve? In my mind the order is clear:
The pixel is very nearly dead.
If there’s one last rift between the analog and digital experience it’s the obnoxious glow we endure every day from the multitude of displays that surround us.
The 2010 e-ink Kindle that sits on my nightstand remains one of my favorite devices for its soft, comfortable reading experience and the 30-day battery life. It might sound like a first world problem, but as people add one more cable to their bedside and begin charging their Apple Watch every night, the idea of a device lasting 30 days seems more and more like the miracle of Hanukkah.
As an industrial designer first, I’ll go further and say that backlit displays will always anchor wearables to a rock called dorkdom. When display technology eventually matches the beauty of a printed color photograph, this moving paper will make the integration of hardware and software truly seamless, and we’ll have finally emerged from what still seems to me like an uncanny valley.
Products like the Electric Objects EO1 make it obvious that this new display type can’t come soon enough, even outside the world of wearables. We’ve accepted that displays glow, but they shouldn’t always need to.
What I worry about is whether we’ve hit an evolutionary dead end. LCDs are on a path towards inexorably cheaper prices at greater pixel densities, but they will never solve this challenge. Will it be Mirasol? Color e-ink? Something else? Who knows, but right now, there is no product category pushing us in that direction and it makes me wonder if the convergence of digital and print design will soon plateau.
Update: A couple days later, Amazon released its new e-ink Kindle Voyager, see The Unglowing, Continued.
]]>Gabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz are the founders of Exo, a company that makes protein bars with cricket flour. While it might sound gross at first, eating insects is common practice for most people around the world. There are lots of good reasons why: they're more sustainably grown than livestock, they're high in protein and properly prepared they can truly be delicious.
The idea came on my radar a couple of years ago with a spec packaging project from design students at the Royal College of Art in London. Maybe it's my background in zoology, maybe it's the wild diversity of diets I've seen living in Los Angeles, but the concept made sense to me instantly. When Exo's Kickstarter campaign went live, I jumped at the occasion to support this effort, and give cricket protein a try.
What Gabi and Greg have come up with, is a flour made from crickets that have been frozen, roasted and milled. The resulting flour is mild tasting, and gluten-free by definition. They've combined this flour with other natural ingredients to create protein bars that I can personally say are some of the most delicious I've tasted.
There's a chocolate flavor, a peanut butter and jelly, and a gingerbread-inspired flavor. All three were excellent.
As someone who enjoys treating themselves to steak or sushi, I've often considered the ethical and environmental issues surrounding meat. One of my favorite essays on the topic comes from the introduction to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's exceptional
River Cottage Meat Book, in which he methodically defends eating meat, without looking to antagonize vegetarians. Read it, if you ever get a chance.
I'm convinced that over the next couple of decades, insect protein will grow to become an important part of the Western diet. To some degree it has to, in order to keep up with our demand for protein, and increased standards for animal husbandry (see the controversies over
California's 2008 Prop 2). Soy and pea-based "meat-substitutes" such as Beyond Meat, will only take us so far in balancing our diet away from livestock... but that's a topic for another post.
As you can imagine, the process of bringing a cricket-based product to market has been a challenge. From sourcing crickets, to finding a contract-manufacturer who would handle them, and developing a recipe with Kyle Connaughton of The Fat Duck, we discuss how Exo navigated their first run of protein bars.
Also mentioned on the show: Little Herds, a wonderful nonprofit organization promoting the use of edible insects.
As I alluded to in my conversation with Adam Vollmer of Faraday Bikes, I evaluated ERPs for Lumi. OpenERP was one of the main contenders but ultimately the manufacturing module failed to meet our requirements and custom development would have been too costly.
I was also shocked to get a glimpse at OpenERP's internal corporate structure. Despite the open source nature of the project, their business model puts them on track to become yet another big, slow, expensive ERP company pushing massive service fees.
Unfortunately there's just no great solution in the ERP world. Requirements for this category are so complex that by the time a system becomes adequately feature rich, improvements in software technology make it feel obsolete. I wonder if someone will crack that nut.
]]>This week I'm joined by Owen Gee, founder of Commodity. The company has developed a delightful collection of colognes and perfumes, available online through a home try-on process reminiscent of Warby Parker.
Like myself and previous guest Andrew Kim, Owen came out of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Shortly after graduating, he joined Ferroconcrete, a lauded branding agency in Los Angeles. Founded by Yo Santosa (yet another ACCD alum), the agency quickly established an impressive roster of clients including TBS, TNT and Pinkberry. Ferroconcrete also became an incubator for projects such as Fruute, and eventually Commodity.
As you might expect, the sophisticated branding behind Commodity came naturally to Owen and his team, but the process of bringing these fragrances to market took much more than that. On the show we explore their experience funding the project on Kickstarter, the challenges and benefits of a bottled product, the process of creating an authoritative yet friendly brand, and unpacking the complex world of cosmetic chemistry.
Mentioned on the show:
This week I'm joined by three of the designers on FiftyThree's hardware team: Jon Harris, John Ikeda and Hauke Gentzkow.
FiftyThree is probably best known for Paper, an intuitive and beautifully designed sketching app for iPad. Many of the company's founding team members are ex-Microsofties who participated in developing the Xbox, Zune and the fatefully mothballed Courier tablet.
Its latest product, the Pencil stylus, connects to the app via Bluetooth and works with the humanistic simplicity we've come to expect from FiftyThree.
On the show we discuss how to build intuitive, accessible products by starting with the experience and how that design philosophy has led FiftyThree to create a wonderful ecosystem of software, hardware and services.
We cover some of the team's extensive background at Microsoft, the challenges of making hardware in small versus large companies, some of the pros and cons of crowdfunding and more. Enjoy!
Mentioned on the show:
I met Adam Vollmer, founder of Faraday Bikes a few months ago and was lucky enough to ride a prototype of their beautiful electric bicycle, the Faraday Porteur.
On the show we discuss turning what started as a side-project at IDEO into a Kickstarter campaign, and finally a fully-fledged, shipping product.
As you can imagine, it's a product that involves hundreds of parts, made all over the world. Adam and I dive deep into the challenges of sourcing parts, using tools such as Alibaba and working with a complex supply chain.
Faraday Bikes also made a recent appearance at CES 2014. We discuss the benefits of trade shows, Indiegogo's booth, and how this flows into their marketing strategy for 2014.
Additional Links
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it.
Of course, one must differentiate between seeing a new technology that inspires a product (e.g. Steve Jobs seeing the first GUI at Xerox PARC), and developing technologies for the sake of R&D, with only potential prospects of turning these technologies into products.
]]>I had hoped to see Nest remain fiercely independent, but we’re undoubtedly heading for a House of Whacks scenario within a few short years.
]]>I’m curious to see where this investment leads them. The announcement explicitly indicates a move into offline retail, presumably to support their efforts competing with Square on point-of-sale—but knowing Shopify I am certain there is more to it.
]]>This week we explore the intersection of food and technology with Bam Suppipat, co-founder of Nomiku.
Nomiku are the makers of a radically simple immersion circulator, an easy way to precisely cook many of your favorite foods. The device makes sous-vide cooking accessible to anyone, bringing a staple of high-end cuisine into the home.
Below is a peek at Nomiku’s safe and intuitive one-button design, compared to equipment once reserved to science labs (shot at their test kitchen in San Francisco).
The team behind Nomiku participated in the HAXLR8R program’s first graduating class, a new accelerator for hardware startups based in Shenzhen, China. Bam tells us about his experience with the program and how it flowed into Nomiku’s highly successful Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $586K.
From there we discuss how food and science interact, some of the seminal works including Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, Modernist Cuisine and how new tools and techniques are leading us towards more scientific, predictable ways to cook.
Finally we end with a brief primer on UL certification, and the unexpected challenges of bringing an electric product to market.
Links
Why is our show called You Can’t Eat Bits for Breakfast? On this episode I’m joined by Jesse Genet, my coconspirator at Lumi, and originator of the phrase.
Together we discuss the early experiences that led Jesse towards an entrepreneurial and creative life, her penchant for classic cars, lessons on competition from Buffalo Bill and why it’s important to make physical things.
We end by contemplating an article by Geoffrey Miller entitled Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens in which he discusses the idea that by the time a civilization becomes advanced enough to visit another planet, it has the ability to virtually simulate the experience in more instantly gratifying way.
As esoteric as it might sound, this theory is a reminder that there is so much left to discover and create in the world of atoms.
Links
I’m joined by Andrew Kim, a good friend and one of my favorite young designers. Together we discuss the importance of harmony and attention to detail in design.
You might know Andrew from his branding exercise redesigning Microsoft. This 3-day project garnered remarkable traction online and eventually helped him land a job designing hardware at Xbox. Microsoft recently profiled Andrew shining a spotlight on some of his earliest work, including the Ecocoke project, and how it has flowed into his excellent blog Minimally Minimal and recently, 90°, his book on knolling.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Andrew is his keen sense of observation. Spend a few minutes reading his blog and you’ll begin to understand how he visually deconstructs a product into lines, shapes and colors, the sum of which can be called form language.
Why is form language important? Our conversation was a reminder that participating in mass production is a responsibility to create elegant, harmonious designs that contribute to society, rather than add to the cacophony.
It’s sad to see Winamp go. The company had a great sense of humor and an inspiring indie culture that was gradually crushed after its acquisition by AOL. Sadder to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the interface.
]]>People have asked me how this will affect their service but I can’t give a firm answer. It’s too early to tell whether the founders see this as a well-deserved exit or an opportunity to do more.
It’s important to remember that Shipwire is first and foremost a software company. As far as I can tell, they do not own any of the warehouses. Rather they provide software for them and a front-end that connects to popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify. The brilliance of their design is making it all feel vertically integrated, and building their own customer service that relays issues to the warehouses. They understand the opportunity in serving tech-savvy small businesses.
Shipwire is the best I’ve seen when it comes to providing a simple front-end UI that doesn’t require a logistics background to grasp. It can’t be overstated how big of a deal that is in the fulfillment industry. This is where I get concerned about the acquisition.
I hadn’t heard about Ingram Micro, but from what I can dig up, their focus has typically been on the enterprise market, as a technology provider. I worry that this will gradually drive the Shipwire experience towards increasing complexity and horizontal integration.
That being said, Shipwire has had its own growing pains. The fact that their customer service staff filters issues before they reach the warehouse is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it makes the user experience friendlier and more seamless, on the other it means their staff is less close to the metal and has a difficult time avoiding preventable issues.
My hope is to see Shipwire use its new resources to continue simplifying logistics and continue vertically integrating by increasing its presence on the ground in warehouses. Wait and see.
]]>Over the past month I attended two fantastic events: the second edition of XOXO in Portland and my first experience at Brooklyn Beta. It was such a thrill to be in the presence of like-minded thinkers and creators. For the longest time Jesse and I flew by the seat of our pants building Lumi. Our first Kickstarter campaign, back in 2009 was a stab in the dark. Many of the tools and software platforms we used to launch the business were brand new. There was no blueprint to follow.
Yet meeting fellow creators in Portland and Brooklyn, it became obvious that we all chose to follow a similar path. It simply made common sense. Reading Chris Anderson’s book “Makers” last year, I felt he had crystallized this new way to build modern products and launch creative ideas. It made me feel a lot less crazy—in a good way.
Throughout my work at Lumi, I’ve never stopped being involved in product strategy and industrial design. Jesse and I have often taken to platforms such as Skillshare and Google Hangouts to share our experience of using Kickstarter and building Lumi. We’ve advised project creators, and have been deeply involved in the product design stage (soon I’ll be able to announce a couple big new projects).
But after a few great conversations with Andy Baio, Barton Smith and Rusty Meadows, it occurred to me: I could be doing a whole lot more to help independent creators gain a foothold in hardware and physical products.
There are a lot of great things already in motion. Pioneers like Studio Neat and MNML, or projects such as Pebble, OUYA, MYO, Oculus Rift, Lockitron and many more. We’re living in an age where almost anyone with a good idea and enough moxie can build a product and take it to market. But by the same token, people are now approaching it from radically different backgrounds: inventors, designers, developers, engineers, entrepreneurs… and many who simply have a passion and a problem they’re eager to solve.
This is where the rubber meets the road. If you want to take on a big new project, especially one that concerns making physical goods, you better be ready to learn. None of it is easy. Prototyping, raising money, manufacturing, marketing, shipping. It’s all hard stuff.
My goal for Edgemade is to invite you in diving deep into the next Industrial Revolution, provide you insight into the successes and failures of this burgeoning movement, and continue to practice its values. In addition to the blog, the first episode of its companion podcast, You Can’t Eat Bits For Breakfast launches today. I hope you’ll join me!
]]>Today we talk to Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, founders of Studio Neat. We discuss the lessons learned after multiple Kickstarter campaigns, keeping your business simple, going to retail and fulfilling products with Shipwire.
Tom and Dan have been pioneers in bringing physical goods to market through Kickstarter. Their first campaign, the Glif tripod mount, launched the first wave of Kickstarter hardware and Apple accessories back in 2010. Since then, they’ve returned to the platform three more times with the Cosmonaut, Simple Bracket, and most recently, the Neat Ice Kit.
They’ve also written a terrific book titled “It Will Be Exhilirating”, which I consider a must-read for anyone interested in launching a product independently. Their talk at XOXO 2012 contains lots of useful tidbits along the same lines and can be seen on YouTube or in this short write-up by Anil Dash.
Finally, Tom and Dan will be hosting a packaging workshop at the upcoming Nearly Impossible conference which I urge anyone in the New York area to attend.
He not busy being born is busy dying
It’s a philosophy of life.
Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career. If you’re good enough, and the product you provide is timeless, say a great whiskey from a recipe honed by generations, you might make it. You’d be fragile, and susceptible to unexpected events, but you might make it through life, happy and able to care for your family and employees.
But if there’s one lesson to be learned from last year’s documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushiit’s that even masters in their craft are constantly learning, constantly looking to improve, always challenging their own assumptions. In Jiro’s case, at age 86 and beyond. Relentlessly.
Stand-up comedian Louis C.K. famously throws out his act every year and writes a new one from scratch, going against the notion that stand-ups like bands should continually play their greatest hits. And it shows, at 45 Louis C.K. is still improving. His fame was earned through years of continual rebirth.
A tried and true way to experience rebirth is to teach. Not necessarily as an academic, mind you, but by giving away your techniques to the up-and-coming. To teach is first to distill what you know, and to know it for yourself in theory as much as you do by instinct and practice. By teaching you will know what you know better than you did, and by giving away your techniques you will empower your peers and competitors. You will be forced to compete creatively and to open new doors for yourself. It’s a bit like running from a pack of wild dogs while dropping behind you a trail of fresh meat. Scary, but the only sure way to keep on your toes and thrive.
The examples are endless, and extend across crafts and lines of business. A strong case in recent years has been Apple. In many ways it taught the technology industry and the business world that designing for the end-user is important, and that vertically-integrated business models are a powerful way to create a consistent, well-designed experience that makes customers happy and keeps them coming back. Today, its competitors have learned. Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and others have improved their design sensibility, they’ve adopted vertically-integrated business models, but all they’ve done is caught up. Apple has known all this for years, and if there’s an optimistic outlook for the company it’s that while everyone is busy catching up, they are busy being born.
]]>Each vanilla flower blooms just one morning out of every year. The orchid can only be naturally pollinated by a small Mexican bee, and if it isn’t pollinated that morning, the flower will wilt. No bean. Commercially, vanilla is now delicately hand-pollinated one flower at a time.
The labor involved in vanilla production makes it the second most expensive spice in the world (after saffron). Its flavor has been prized since Mesoamerican times, and as you well know, can be found in every ice cream shop on Earth.
So I ask—please, next time you think of using the adjective “vanilla”, consider the words “plain” or “mundane”. Because vanilla is far from being either of those.
Now look at what you’re building and ask yourself, is your “default” option anywhere near as good as vanilla? If not, don’t get carried away trying to design chocolate and strawberry.
]]>Apple goes whole hog. You gotta admire that. Few companies have the guts to embrace their own decisions fully, but Apple has consistently done so and consistently attracted criticism for that attitude (remember floppies? Blu-Ray? Flash?).
Sometime in the mid-2000s Apple began embracing glass and aluminum as dominant materials across all product lines. Some speculate that it’s a Jobsian fetish, that the choice is purely aesthetic. But while the look is certainly iconic, and there are functional benefits too, there’s a very rare commonality between glass and aluminum that exceeds coincidence. It’s a property which I believe Jony Ive will take credit for advocating. Glass and aluminum are both infinitely recyclable. That is, both materials can be 100% recycled with virtually no degradation.
Because they are infinitely recyclable glass and aluminum can be melted down and reshaped without losing structural integrity. That’s why glass bottles and aluminum cans are so widespread. The benefit of infinite recyclability is not just in the reuse of material it’s also in the environmental cost of creating usable glass and aluminum. According to The Economist, recycling aluminium requires 95% less energy than making it from scratch, and glass requires 30% less.
Today there are hundreds of plastics available to industrial designers which in most ways will perform just as well as aluminum or glass, but none are infinitely recyclable. The problem is that plastics generally contain additives and colorants. When such tainted plastics go to recycling plants, they are mixed with other plastics which contain other additives and colorants resulting in less valuable, less useful plastic which cannot be reused for the same purpose – thus the term ‘downcycling’.
Apple, like many other hardware manufacturers has often been accused of engineering planned obsolescence in its products, meaning that these become obsolete before the functional end of their life. Indeed Apple’s one-year product cycle far outpaces the potential longevity of an iPhone or MacBook.
But in the arms race that is the high-tech marketplace, it is difficult to imagine how a company like Apple could survive without updating their models regularly.
My guess is that Apple sees infinite recyclability as peace of mind. Despite the necessity of regular hardware updates, the structural components of all their products could be 100% recycled – turned into brand new Macs and iPads. A clear conscience.
From what I see and hear, people seem to like the new aluminum enclosures. I certainly do. But Apple’s love of glass hasn’t seen the same reception. Glass shatters, glass causes glare, glass is heavy. These are some of the complaints I’ve heard. As John Gruber said, the iPhone 4 is practically undroppable, “it’s like dropping a piece of toast that’s been buttered on both sides”.
On the other hand, glass is enjoyed for its beauty and cleanability. But the discussion rarely turns to environmental benefits. One culprit is certainly Apple itself – Apple does very little to promote the recyclability of its products.
When Apple released the Unibody Macbooks, they made a big deal of the new aluminum enclosure: its simplicity, its strength, its precision. But what of recyclability? Zilch. Even inthis interview for industrial design magazine Core77 Jony Ive makes no mention of the efforts made to improve the environmental footprint of the iPhone 4.
Small bullet-points can be found in the tech specs of most products (almost always dead last) and their ‘Environment’ page has a few short words:
Apple’s approach to recycling begins in the design stage, when we create compact, efficient products that require less material to produce. The materials we do use — including arsenic-free glass, high-grade aluminum, and strong polycarbonate — are highly valuable to recyclers, who can reclaim them for use in new products.
Apple calls its iPad Smart Cover “genius”, but relegates a world-class corporate environmental stance to a few orphaned bullet points. Why?
Clearly, Apple has spent tremendous resources over the past ten years engineering a highly sophisticated supply chain and production process to accommodate glass and aluminum. But why has Apple been so reluctant to inform the public of this effort?
Honestly, I’m not sure. Here are a few ideas:
Unfortunately, I’m afraid the true reason is more grim. Consumers just aren’t looking for green labels in their electronic devices. Apple may simply be waiting for its environmental stance to become a more marketable factor. In my opinion, however, consumers need to be educated on recyclability and should indeed expect more products to have such a thought-out lifecycle.
]]>