Obsessions hinder good design

James Dyson's obsession with high-speed cyclonic airflow continues to develop to pointless ends. This bladeless fan pushes air across a circular groove in the hoop - invisible in this illustration - at very high speed and pressure, resulting in a weak current of air emerging from space near the metal hoop accompanied by the extremely loud roar that air makes when it is placed under pressure and pushed at high speeds through a small aperture. The fan wobbles visibly when put on an oscillating setting. The cheap plastic base is painted in the usual kitsch manner to imitate anodised aluminium.

Intelligence carried this far becomes indistinguishable from stupidity. Most of the engineering and ergonomic problems associated with fan blades can be resolved by making the blades larger and turning them more slowly. It is also likely that the room whose occupants feel the need for a fan is part of a building that has significant design flaws - for example, it has an aspect or has been made from materials that disregard the prevailing climate completely.

Laptop computer design

It was surprising to find during an excursion to a computer store that the standard of finish on most consumer laptops has declined as central processor power has increased. It seems wrong to me that costly, late-model laptops with high technical specifications should present the same design appeal as Tupperware or a hair curler.

Plastic is manufactured from petroleum. Its chemistry is ‘oily’ and so it is insoluble in water and usually very toxic when burned. One reason that plastic is an inherently unpleasant material to touch is its chemical affinity for the oil produced by healthy human skin. You may have noticed this affinity the last time you attempted to wash plastic containers that had been used for food that is oily or fatty. The high-gloss finish being applied to the ABS plastic fascia of today’s consumer electronics only emphasises the greasy, slippery feedback that all plastics offer to human skin. It should not be surprising that rubberised or satinised plastic surfaces are more appealing to touch than the optimistically-named ‘piano gloss’ finish. It may be that in computer manufacture plastic has structural and cost-saving merits that simply cannot be ignored, but this does not excuse the meanness and trickiness of the thinking behind a ‘piano gloss’ finish on a plastic object. Let what is plastic announce itself as such and sell itself on its merits – whatever these are in a device costing $A 2 000.
































Above: Not to be confused.

Given the limitations set by case materials being chosen for their low cost, kitsch façadism has crept into recent attempts to freshen the aesthetics of laptop computers. There are numerous instances of milled- or pressed-metal effects applied to painted plastic with repellent results. One example is the highly-specified Toshiba Qosmio.














Above: Toshiba Qosmio. This studio shot has the same relationship to the Qosmio on the dealer’s shelf as gourmet food photography does to your own efforts in the kitchen.

The unrelieved nastiness of the misleadingly molded and painted plastic keyboard surround is redoubled by the keyboard itself, a rubbishy assemblage of flat, thin keys finished in high-gloss plastic. Hewlett-Packard offers a variety of ugly laser-etched motifs apparently inspired by 2-dollar-shop shower curtains. The worst of these appears to be imitating a crocheted doily.

Below: The hopefully-named Hewlett-Packard Envy.






























Solid-colour satinised finishes make more fortuitous references to certain kinds of mountaineering and outdoor activity equipment but, if they are applied to ABS plastic rather than the aluminium, achieving design integrity is impossible for the afflicted product.

The ‘chiclet’ keyboard exudes cheapness wherever it is installed. Apple’s aluminium-covered laptops cannot redeem it and the company ought to be condemned for using it. The ‘chiclet’ key is a design failure. It gives poor – wobbling, uncertain and greasy – tactile feedback and has almost no travel.
















It should not be necessary to spend more than $A 4 000 on ‘military-specified’ or ‘ruggedised’ laptops in order to own a laptop with design integrity (which does not, so far, exclude ugliness). But only one laptop in the consumer market embodies the fundamental rules of laptop design, at least within the present limits of the form factor: it is the Lenovo Thinkpad.














Above: The Thinkpad T410, a moderately successful laptop design.

I will mention only the aesthetic rules here. Laptops contain numerous square-cornered components (see picture at top). Except where they touch the user’s body, their design elements should have square corners and flat cross-sections: no designed hyperspace. Plastics should be rubberised or satinised to improve their inherently poor tactile feedback. A magnesium-alloy chassis and screen hinge should be evident as well as present in the substructure of the laptop. A coherent colour scheme in a laptop means a solid-colour design maximizing the visual impact of the colours chosen and taking advantage of the natural properties of the construction materials: no painted, faux-etched or faux-engraved graphical elements. Users are always free to deface the laptop lid as they choose. The keyboard should use dished-face, medium-travel keys controlled by dome switches as found in full-sized desktop keyboards.

Disastrous design errors in a Mercedes Benz concept car

The Mercedes-Benz company has fallen into what might be described, if the nature of its decline were to relate to a person, as a state of spiritual malaise. Mercedes vehicles have lost much of the build quality, technological edge and design élan that once defined a world-famous marque. Mercedes now charges its famously steep premium for ugly, failure-prone and unremarkable cars. This ‘shooting brake concept’ vehicle is worth analysing because it takes all the current design mistakes now in vogue at Mercedes-Benz to extremes. In attempting to reach the top of the class of the Bangle school it exudes an air of snazzy, fatuous cheapness that would draw laughter from the casual observer if it wore a lesser car maker’s badge.

The genius contribution to car design of Chris Bangle that he called ‘flame surfacing’ creates the same sense here as it does on the bodies of the ugliest BMWs ever made, of simultaneous starvation and obesity. The bloating effect is especially noticeable on the Benz's beltline, which has been given an upwards-bellying curve to no effect other than to unbalance the car's proportions.

The entire greenhouse is a disaster, with errors accumulating, as they do in a poor design, toward the rear. The C-pillar is restrictive of both passenger headroom and rearward visibility for the driver while playing a large part in the car’s general sense of extreme, purposeless gesticulation.

A design tic of the moment is to pin elements such as tail-lights, headlights and windows by the corners and stretch them into elongated parodies of themselves. Here foolish-looking tail-lights contend with side glass beyond the C-pillar that has been distorted into a sharks-tooth shape, as if this were the perfect place on the body to display raciness and aggression. The plunging crease defining the haunch and the midline crease collide in a complete mess on the rear door, further complicating the inherent fussiness of 'flame surfacing.' What the crease near the door sills is about is anyone's guess. It subsides uselessly into the profile of the rear bumper. Just above it the only good line in the design struggles to impose unity as it develops into the upper edge of the bumper.

The critic who writes at the site linked below asks, bafflingly, ‘Who would have ever thought the humble Karmann Ghia might influence Mercedes-Benz styling?’ Would that it actually had done so. I would suggest it is more appropriate that the designers of this ‘shooting brake concept’ vehicle kneel before the house of Ghia and polish the boots of its designers with the oil of their collective nose.

A review of the Mercedes-Benz 'shooting brake concept' vehicle

Blandness is not taste

Another interior of crushing blandness. There appears to be a misguided belief among today's interior designers that a colour palette muted to the point of imperceptibility is the height of good taste. This interior has a prominent position on an architectural design web site, as though it were a paragon for others to regard with jealousy and awe. The design house to avoid is Chelsea Hing Design Consultants.

Design failure: playing cards

An obsession with the typographically mean and tricky has resulted in this extravagantly illegible set of playing cards.













A photograph of the cards of this size is a good legibility test for the design. Where is the ten of diamonds?



















To expect any comprehension of any card's value at this distance would be unreasonable.




But how difficult is it to read the standard design in the same constrained conditions? Your immediate recognition of this image as the two of hearts was correct.

The designer, Jim Sutherland, claims to have 'solved 52 micro-design problems' with this set of playing cards. Incorrect: he has fixed 52 unbroken designs.

The ambiguity of minimalist graphics

Degree of self-esteem












Characteristics of self-reporting












Punctuality












Approach to difficulties and challenges in life












Behaviour towards a source of gratification or need satisfaction












Amount of complaining, boasting and arguing



These graphics were developed by the designer Yang Liu to show cultural differences between Germany and China.

The design virtues are readily apparent, although a delicate balance is struck between being simple and being cryptic.

I think this series could have wider applications than broad cultural comparisons. Seen as a comparison of behaviour arising from personality types, the blue side of each pair succinctly represents behaviours based on rationality; the red side neurosis. I have labelled each graphic accordingly. The original context and message of the graphics can be seen at the link below.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2009/10/29/east-vs-west-yang-liu-infographics/

BMW begins to recover from Bangle

Automotive styling continues to develop in interesting directions. With the departure of Chris Bangle from BMW's design shopfloor, the design pedigree of one of Europe's top automotive marques has begun to recover. Bangle's efforts have been widely and rightly criticised; it is perhaps enough to say here that he created BMWs that looked Korean.

The first sign of improvement in the obese, banal and slackly decorative Bangle 'look' can be seen in the 2010 3-series coupe. For BMW improvement must mean a return to the sober and elegant lines of their 1980s- and 1990s-era vehicles. Eleven years of design history stand between the two BMW models shown below, but they share a number of cues.

Top: the E46 3-series coupe from the late 1990s. Bottom: 2010 3-series coupe.

The similarity between the old and the new is a sign of design success for BMW, for Bangle was obsessed with fixing unbroken designs. The boot-line, which in Bangle-designed cars appears as a shrunken, flat ledge glued on to a Porsche-like fastback tail, has been returned to a normal profile. The tail lights still have not recovered their correct BMW form factor, and their blobby look belongs to the cheap, poorly assembled American sedans Bangle was so much better suited to designing. The up-swept rear skirt ending in the rear diffuser makes a pleasing return, slightly more pronounced now than it was in 1999. In combination with the sloping boot-line, it recalls the tapered rear of classic models such as the 535i coupe of the mid-eighties. Body panels from the fashionably high belt-line down have straighter cut-lines and less fussy cross-sections, but they require further correction to achieve the sleekness of older designs. The side-skirts and nearby cut-lines at the lower edge of the doors still retain the Bangle touch - or rather fussy, sagging gesticulation. All that is needed to correct their line is a ruler. The lowered, swept-back greenhouse, borrowed from Aston Martin, suggests once more the purposeful, sport-oriented body that BMW, years ago, could design in its sleep.

The profile of the 2010 3-series still strikes me as ill-proportioned compared to the 1999 model, because the high beltline when compared with a lowered greenhouse creates a slabby look suggestive of a car not tall enough for its length - a 'microcephalic' effect. This is not an unusual problem in contemporary car design. The current Lexus IS series sedan, widely acknowledged as beautifully engineered and constructed vehicles, suffers from the same thing.

The 'Korean look' in vehicle design is, ironically, far better now than five or ten years ago because of its manufacturers' recent borrowings from the work of European designers. It is through this strategy that Kia has produced an attractive, if stupidly named, car which borrows successfully from the best-designed sedans in the world.

Above: the 2010 Kia Cerato Koupe.

The rear quarter around the C-pillar and boot-line to the tail lights is successful, recalling the superbly resolved Alfa Romeo 159 sedan; the car's face is borrowed from the Honda Accord Euro, which itself followed the 'if you can't do it, steal it' design strategy with great success. From a little below the belt-line, the design becomes clumsy. The absurdly over-emphasised rear bumper is a gross mistake, as is the sagging part of the door sill that flows away from the A-pillar. The transition from the upper corners of the bonnet through the base of the A-pillar to the belt-line is a challenging one in any vehicle design. The Koup's wheel-arches repeat the ugly motif of exaggeratedly angular cross-section found in a number of cars today. Overall, the design has a freshness that could not have been predicted from the nation responsible for some of the dullest road cars ever made.

Dullness should not be rewarded

This surpassingly dull domestic interior has just received a national design award in Australia - for use of colour.

Design failure: kitsch façadism

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.
-Milan Kundera

Not necessarily.


















A vilely egregious use of kitsch façadism in an award-winning fitout of a butcher's shop (get it?). The tactile and visual feedback of this door handle are, to put things politely, at odds.

Design failure: obsessive and tricky bench

This stunningly wasteful design for outdoor public seating requires enough materials to seat three but can seat only two, while meanly denying homeless people anywhere to sleep - a feature sure to meet with local council approval. The obsession with bentwood forms has trumped any consideration of usability.

Explicit structure

Explicit structure is one of the distinguishing marks of good design.

Definition of kitsch

These two complementary examples should help to illuminate my use of the term kitsch in design.


















1. Built forms imitating organic forms (above).

2. Organic forms imitating built forms (below).