Design is Everything . . .

What are you passionate about?

From the moment we wake up to the time we go back to sleep, everything we touch or interact with is Designed, even the human body.

Think about it, you wake up from a bed that is designed, and the first thing you will want to do is probably clean your teeth. The brush has been ergonomically designed, the tube you squeeze the paste from was designed to make it easy to use, the tap you draw water from is carefully designed to control the water pressure. Extrapolate this to everything you do from there on throughout the day and think of anything that isn’t designed. You will find none.

There is a Japanese tradition that ensures that a used toothpick will not be mistaken for an unused one. It’s the reason good toothpicks have serrations that allows you to break them after use. And to avoid it falling off, the two pieces can be used to lock each other when placed on a table. This is a tiny and perhaps an unrecognizable design detail, but it means a lot to a culture.

I always wondered how the original Coca Cola bottle was made the way it was. We all tend to hold it mid way with our clinched fingers, and it’s almost natural. The lines you see there are there to ensure a good grip. This is a result of Design. Most things we overlook are the best deigned because they appear almost lost or inevitable.

We might think design is the addition of rather than the removal of. Take the human anatomy for instance, the best reference we can have for what is good design. Each part of the human body has been designed to perform multiple functions, take for example the ears for hearing and balancing, the nose for smelling and breathing, the mouth for talking and eating, all amongst many other functions. But the real magic is what happens inside the body we never see.

I will always defer to the design of the MacBook Pro as an example of good design. The approach was to design it inside out, so the complexities happen inside the machine with a constant attempt to always minimize by removing components and stripping it down to its essence. The evolution of the unibody, ensuring a seamless tactile object the human can interact with was a triumph.

Yes, I’m passionate about design. Good design at that, because there are very bad designs out there as well.