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Comment by kraig911 | Hacker News Reader

I personally think right now that industrial design, architecture and still fashion have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to designing great things with regards to technology. Gone are the days where you can be concerned with the physical looks of a thing. I've met designers who can do everything just that the upper management team(s) don't get it.

If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.

I imagine a lot of these designers are leaving because they're trying really hard but keep making things that never see the light of day.

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We are getting new form factors, they're just so radical you don't recognize them: laptop->tablet/phone, phone->watch, desktop->VR headset, home assistant. None of them are perfect substitutes yet, which is why the old form factors persist, but look at how many people are doing on their phones today what used to require a laptop or desktop. It's not hard to imagine a watch plus earbuds replacing the phone for most (but not all) users, and home assistant replacing a desktop for some (but not most).

> If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.

It could also be diminishing returns as technologies mature. Most smartphones have converged on the black slab. That may because physics and relatively inelastic customer needs define the form factor. Said another way, is a breakthrough new form worth ever larger amounts of nonrenewable resources? At what point does it stop? Do we mine the Earth into a wasteland for a single, levitating, all-knowing monolith?

"People don't design ships, the ocean designs ships". The black slab is popular not because people are making it, but because people are buying it. This doesn't mean that it is optimal, but companies have to respond to market pressures.

What alternatives are there to the black slab? A modern smartphone is over 99% screen, all you've got is bezel and the back to play with. And on the other side, what alternatives are there to actually buy?

Also your quote doesn't seem to support your argument. You can't claim that design is customer led, and then use an example where it's led by something else.

MSFT had a demo/concept of a foldable device with a stylus many many years ago.

It basically felt like a notebook and was super interesting, even without having a foldable screen. Sadly, it didn't go anywhere. Could we have a thing that opens up like a deck of cards/fan? How about we use that back side for a low-consuption always on screen?

I refuse to think phones are "solved".

Phones aren't solved because we keep reinventing what a 'phone' is. The phone was solved 100 years ago, then we decided people should do their own dialing. Now we are at the point where a smartphone isn't really a phone anymore.

I can think of a few improvements to phones as well. Make them smaller, and add a headphone jack, sd card reader and removable battery....

There's probably some good books on the subject that I can't remember right now, I think that design in the large, has a good amount out evolution to it, I mean that in the proper biological sense. It finds one, or a few local maxima, but needs really shaking up to 'progress' from there. We have found the local maxima in the smartphone space, but then Stove Jebs will come along with a voice activated communicator that you wear on your chest, and we'll start again.

I think Stove Jebs did a great job changing what we think a 'phone', or for that matter a 'computer' is, and that shouldn't be underestimated.

Even now, ten years later, I find myself amazed at how much of a change in the adoption of computing the iPhone has made, and how we are still trying to understand the effects, good and bad, this has on society. I still vividly remember 'chat' being something geeks do, or self-consciously using my stylus-based Palm device for todos and calendaring because I sure as hell didn't want my high school classmates to catch me in the act.

But I'm also very curious about what the next thing will be that punts us out of this 'local maxima', whether it's some reconceptualization of how we actually use these devices responsibly, a completely new device, or something I can't imagine.

My point was that designers don't get to decide what products get launched, the market does. If there was an alternate design that created excitement and was relatively affordable, it would very quickly become popular. Products are created through user testing, market research, and limited by available components (which themselves are limited by what's already out there), so change is slow and conservative.

The market decides what is popular, to a point. They don't get to decide what is launched. I don't think designers really get to decide that either though.

I'd disagree that change is slow and conservative. In the smartphone biz they're coming out with half baked ideas all the time. I'd agree progress is slow for certain things, but then its astonishingly fast in other ways.

Trying to identify what we actually disagree about here, it seems you see a lot more order in the process? I made the point in another reply in this subthread that I see it more like evolution. Its messy, with lots of dead ends, and as soon as you start trying to generalise, the Duck billed Platypus says hello.

For every product that has gone through user testing, we have Samsung coming out with one that evidently hasn't.

Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab to the market with the ThinkPad, including the TrackPoint (the red joy button), the butterfly keyboard, and the transparent LCD display with removable back cover that works with an overhead projector (at a time when overhead projectors were much more common that expensive video projectors).

IBM Pointing Stick #1 - 10_25_91:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY&feature=youtu.be...

(Not Edwin Selker!)

Ted Selker Oral History:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpw7Bml_XvI

>He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial-intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".

(Check out his red TrackPoint lapel pin!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760

>IBM ThinkPad 760CDV - Similar to the 760CD, this unique model had a removable back cover on the LCD that would permit light to shine through for use on an overhead projector.

IBM ThinkPad 701c "butterfly" keyboard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLj3aCfqzOM

Opening and closing IBM ThinkPad 701c with unique keyboard folding mechanism.

ThinkPad TrackPoints - how do they work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3A7LDyizlc

Early TrackPoint prototypes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Ss6F1qIHU

He sounds like a ‘product’ guy.

The TrackPoint grew out of his university research, and a lot of user testing and measurement and iterative improvement went into it before IBM allowed him to ship it in a real product. (The youtube video talks about the pressure=>velocity mapping curve they developed and refined.) He collaborated with his father, a material scientist, who designed the rubbery grippy material so it felt just right.

I had a 760CDV. That was an amazing machine in an era where you had to carry projector panels around. It never failed to amaze onlookers.

It was brilliantly focused on solving such a practical real-world problem of the era. But its window of opportunity has closed. Today's laptops can't just afford the overhead or support such open transparency. ;)

That sounds really interesting. You don't happen to have any pictures of it? I didn't find anything through Google, just that it existed.

there are pictures of the 755CDV doing that, if that's of any interest:

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3566815....

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/755cdv.j...

http://www.lenovoblog.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/thinkpad...

(from http://www.lenovoblog.cz/2016/02/historie-rodiny-notebooku-i... )

https://thinkwiki.de/755

Yeah those pictures show it very well. The only thing you don't really see is the existential dread as you hook your expensive laptop to the projector in an inbalanced fashion using velcro straps....

> Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab

I always thought that ThinkPads were done by IBM Japanese RnD centre

Essentially, if you are a public company, you can't afford to spend resources on products that have a limited market when you have projects that you know will be successful to produce. You can only spend the occasional resource on what I call "technological flexing" where a company develops a product to show off what they are capable, such as the Galaxy Fold.

As someone that work in the product design field, I fully expect that the vast majority of my ideas don't see the light of day. You have to have zero ego when it comes to discarding good but impractical ideas. My job is to come up with the best ideas that provide the most value to customers and the lowest cost to the company.

If we only concentrate on market forces then we'll always be making faster horses instead of cars.

The last paragraph rings true to me. I've had designers leave my company because I consistently picked other designs over their's. IMO it comes down to a builder versus maintainer mindset.

And so begins the inevitable rise of tonerheads at Apple.

It ebbs and flows over the years. The lowest stinkiest neap tide of the worst ebb ever was the QuickTime 4.0 Player Debacle. "Think Different" but "Do Same".

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtimeno.htm

Interface Hall of Shame

- QuickTime 4.0 Player -

Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent "Think Different" advertising campaign is now clear.

While there are some who would conclude that the revised interface represents innovative thinking at Apple, we would have to conclude otherwise. There is nothing innovative about the user interface of the QuickTime 4.0 Player; the developers adopted the same misguided principles employed in IBM's RealThings, copied some of the same features we critiqued in our reviews of IBM's RealPhone and RealCD, and added a few new follies of their own.

It was much worse than that, long before that. Copland, Taligent, and the warehouses full of aging beige boxes. A million different product lines with inscrutable model numbers. Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Then Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs came back and discontinued all of those product lines and all of the dead-end operating system development and set about turning NextStep into Mac OS X. He released the iMac and Apple finally had a recognizable consumer computer for the first time since the 80s.

>Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Interestingly I think they may be falling back into that now, the laptop line in particular looks confused to me.

Same goes for the iPad and iPhone. Never thought I'd see the day when iPhone model names became as meaninglessly inscrutable as Nokia's or Blackberries (e.g. BB Curve 9730).

iOS devices are easy.

There’s the ones that you can buy, and the ones that they want to sell.

Thanks for the link. I have fond nostalgic reminiscences of these gone wrong interface experiments when skeumorphic design was king. There was an aspect of being patronising about the thinking that went with this, an implicit assumption that users were stupid. Nowadays these design patterns have great retro feel.

To a certain extent everything goes in phases and fashions. The Windows XP style buttons were all the rage for a while, nowadays everything is flat. They won't be flat forever.

As we move further away from the analog world the interface mistakes of the past that hark back to skeumorphic analogues of analog devices have a special quality, maybe not for everyone or every thing, but, if you wanted to design a game and set it back in the last century then things like the QT Player or Microsoft Bob provide great inspiration.

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