Golden Ideas to Help Make Life Easier : Designs: Industrial designers are receiving awards for simplifying the complex conveniences that we use every day.
Just how convenient are today’s “modern conveniences”?
That’s a question increasingly being asked by those who help design the home electronic products spilling into our lives. Taking inventory of our technology-stuffed houses, they find things like:
* The latest-model television remote control is crammed with buttons that not only switch channels and adjust volume but offer such mysterious functions as PPV, Ent/Clr, IPPV and Prf/Nxt.
* The integrated telephone answering machine with beeperless remote and message transfer comes with a 25-page instruction catalogue in four languages.
* And if there’s been even a split-second power outage during the day, you know it when you come home because red lights are blinking on the digital radio and microwave oven and VCR, meaning all the clocks have to be reset. Again.
“For the first time in history, people are surrounded by things that do much more than what (individuals) can cope with,” says industrial designer Gianfranco Zaccai. “The logical next step is to make them easier to use.”
Industrial designers are concentrating on that, says Zaccai, who presented 16 gold awards for excellence Wednesday night at the Industrial Designers Society of America’s national conference in Santa Barbara.
Society members design the products, instruments, equipment, furniture, transportation, toys, exhibits and packaging that make up the material aspects of our lives.
Zaccai, whose Design Continuum firm has offices in Boston and Milan, chaired the seven-member jury that judged a record 535 entries in the 11th annual contest, which also handed out 23 silver and 37 bronze awards.
The cutting-edge entries ranged from products as simple as a trash bag holder and a child’s stair rail to such complex systems as a streamlined voting machine with lighted switches for casting votes, and a computerized shopping mall directory with print-out maps.
Some designs are still in the conceptual stage and others are already being marketed. But in all cases, said Zaccai, they provide a legitimate preview of life in the ‘90s.
“These are not science-fiction projections of things we might expect to see 20 years from now,” he said, in a pre-conference telephone interview. “These products are imminently feasible. The designers are making things to sell--looking at ways to make the existing technologies serve human needs better.”
The search can take the designer down any number of paths, he added, as they find ways to simplify, modify, beautify and integrate today’s high-tech equipment. Looking over the society’s gold medal list, Zaccai pointed out examples:
* Sometimes less is more. A TV remote control in the shape of a small silver wand with only three functions--power, channel and volume--was applauded as meeting the human need for simplicity. The Mitsubishi PRM-1 remote control, said the jury, provides a welcome relief from today’s “multikey horrors” with their undecipherable mess of 50 or so buttons battling for space on a brick-sized control case. “It’s comfortable, easy to use, fun and simple,” declared the design jury.
* Another winner in the scale-down category was a satellite receiving dish, an object, observed Zaccai, increasingly littering the urban and rural American landscape. The winning model, described by manufacturer G.E. American Communications, as a “new generation of home roof satellites,” is smaller, has fewer parts and is more flexible than traditional home dishes. It has a graceful design (based on the New England weather vane) that integrates with a roof instead of fighting it, said Zaccai, adding, “This is an example of taking something that is necessary to a lot of people and turning it into a piece of sculpture.”
* As the personal computer and its growing family of accessories take up permanent residence in American homes, designers are moving beyond today’s box-and-wires syndrome. One option, a wall-mounted work station with a fold-up counter under a video screen, was an award winner for NCR Corp., filling several futuristic needs. “It actually supplies you with bookshelves and storage surfaces,” said Zaccai, “so the product is both a piece of electronics and a piece of furniture at the same time. It frees up the floor space, which is important because homes are getting smaller as building and energy costs rise, and it’s an important environmental design because for many people now, the home is the office.”
Another gold medal went to a design team that made complex technology accessible to more people. Hewlett Packard’s VUE 2.0 (Visual User Environment) is a computer software program that got an award “because of the way it uses graphics and walks people through the process of using it,” said Zaccai. The software lets every day computer owners use the UNIX operating system (a high-powered system used by engineers, scientists and computer programmers that allows users to do many different things at the same time) for “multi-tasking.” Jargon strings of command are replaced by a “deceptively simple” set of buttons and graphics on a dashboard across the bottom of the screen. “You wouldn’t have to be working on a space shuttle to use this,” explained one juror. “You could use it for writing a book, doing the illustrations to go with the book, reading your mail and writing and printing letters.”
Those are just samples of the technology-taming projects that Zaccai and others expect to take off in the ‘90s. “It’s a whole new decade with a lot of things coming to a head,” he said. “I think American industry will come to the realization that what they’ve got to do is improve quality and reliability.
“It’s not enough to turn out innovative technology. These things have to be at the service of people.”
