To further my case that design matters…I’m often impressed when I see inventors take every-day objects we take for granted and put a modern improvement on it.
Earlier this year my wife and I invested in the small little ball vacuum cleaner from Dyson. You know the hype, “no messy filters”, “no loss of suction” blah blah.
Sure enough though, after about 5 months of using this thing, it seems to have held up to its bargain. From a designer’s point of view, what I’ve loved about this device is that each piece of it seems to have had a lot of attention put into it — the way each attachment or brush is easily removed, even the way it snaps together it sounds so solid that you feel assured that it’s quality. The way they designed the instruction manuals, it’s illustrated similar to those airline emergency instructions….almost no text at all, but yet it’s obvious what to do. I’m very impressed so far.
As for the vacuum’s suction? Well, my wife is still happy with it…that’s all I care about. Happy wife, happy life right?
And then there are products like this Fire Extinguisher
Why not take a 100 year old item and give it a fresh design that you’d feel ok leaving out in your kitchen? Why not make it more functional and easier to operate? (via: Popular Mechanics)
It’s one of the situations where I’m sitting there going, “DUH, why couldn’t I think of that?” I guess that’s why I feel these things are so clever….they’re just items we take for granted and never considered we should redesign them?
LoweStudio Inc was founded by me, Raphael Lowe, a Honolulu based illustrator and web designer. I presently design and manage a few dozen commercial websites, but my main focus these days is acting as the head developer for Kapiolani Community College and teaching