ALL ART BURNS

I hate cordless phones. Hate hate hate. They are expensive, break easily, interfere with other wireless devices, and when the battery starts to die down, you have to buy some obscure, phone-specific battery for way too much money.

Last week, we bought yet-another-cordless-phone after the GE died and the replacement handset would never sync properly with the base station. This time, I decided to go with a Panasonic, as some similar models had received good ratings in Consumer Reports and Costco had them for cheap.

Setting them up, I was happy to discover that instead of some cordless phone specific battery, they use regular NiMH AAA batteries. Plentiful and cheap when the time comes to replace them.

Now if I could just get a set of schematics and a parts list so we’d have a chance of repairing the phone itself, maybe I’d have a phone that I could maintain over the long run…

Technorati Tags: batteries, design, sustainability

Before landing in Narita, most of my exposure to Japanese design was stuff-for-export-to-the-US: toys, consumer electronics, anime, clothing, etc. It wasn’t until we landed at Narita and started making our way to the hotel that I realized just how different the two countries actually are. Sure, the language and cultural barriers are pretty steep, but there’s also some fundamental differences in how Japanese designers[0] address problems.

Here’s one example: luggage. In the states, luggage is all about ease of movement through airports or accessories that make your luggage clip to other luggage and so on. The problem is, “how do I move a bunch of bags from my house to the airport to the hotel and back again?” and the answer is the latest and greatest products from Victorinox, Samsonite, and their ilk.

In Japan, this problem is solved with an actual service, not better luggage. It’s trivial to drop your luggage off at the airport and have it delivered to your hotel, or delivered from your hotel to another hotel or back to the airport. Within Japan, we travelled only with overnight bags, our massive luggage were dropped off at the front desk of one hotel and delivered to our room at the next.

I don’t think that someone actually said, “how can we solve the luggage problem” as much as someone saw a business opportunity. Yamato Transport doesn’t just move luggage, they move pretty much anything from one point to another. Services instead of consumable products were everywhere. Instead of a stack of napkins at the restaurant, we were given steamed hand-towels. Instead of a bunch of signs at a construction site warning passersby of danger, a real, live human apologized for the inconvenience and directed traffic as needed.

When we checked in to our hotel — jetlagged and confused — we discovered a few other little touches that made a huge difference in our stay and how we thought about our environment. After finding our room and dumping our luggage, we were confused by the fact that the power was out. It took us a few minutes to find the slot by the door where you store your (RFID enabled) room key. When you’re in the room, you put your key in the slot, and the power is turned on for your room. When you leave and take the key with you, everything except the fridge and the washer/dryer are automatically powered down. Not only do you always know where you room key is, but you get a daily reminder of how much energy is wasted by standby power or lights that were accidentally left on.

We were also happy to find that our hotel had a “washlet“, and by the end of our stay we were trying to figure out how to smuggle one home. And also wondering if, perhaps, the Japanese think we’re a bunch of dirty savages when it comes to bathroom hygiene. I’m sure the toilet paper industry would not be happy about the mass adoption of washlets in the States, but I think it’s something that’d probably be better for us (and the environment) in the long run. Washlets are another case of the “service instead of commodity” thinking — instead of buying the best/nicest toilet paper you can afford by the pallet at Costco, why not have a toilet that does most of the cleaning for you?

I’ll end on a question that popped into my head while trying to find a trashcan on the streets of Tokyo,

“Can you design a solution that doesn’t create new consumption patterns?”

[0] For the purposes of simplicity, I’m not going to try and guess whether it was a service designer, interaction designer, UE designer, industrial designer, or whatever designer that designed things that I used.

Technorati Tags: design, japan

A couple of weeks ago, the battery in my 5G iPod, an older 60G, died for the second time. The last time it died, I paid something like $75 to have it replaced and waited a week because I wanted to keep my custom-etched cover. I paid something like $400 for it new, so paying $75 to replace a battery seemed pretty reasonable, if I’d wanted I could probably have done it more cheaply myself.

This time when I visited the Apple store, there was no mention of repair — the only option presented to me was that if I recycle it, I could get %10 off of a new iPod. So, what’s changed? Why is Apple more interested in selling me a new iPod that only holds marginally more media instead of charging me a fair chunk of change to replace the battery in the old one. The rumor is they don’t make profit on the iPod and that it’s subsidized by iTunes sales. Is the hope that in selling me a larger iPod, they increase the amount of sales, and does adding half-again as much space really make that much profit?

So here’s the design issue — why isn’t the iPod designed to be easily repaired by someone at the Genius bar? It’s trivial to swap out the battery in my state of the art Android G1 and it’s been trivial to swap out the battery in almost every mobile phone or mobile HT I’ve owned. I’m trying to remember the last bit of consumer electronics I owned that didn’t allow me to swap out the battery and I’m drawing a blank.

So what’s up, Apple? As a socially responsible company, why aren’t you designing products that can be maintained by the customer instead of designing products that have to be replaced?

Technorati Tags: apple, design, sustainability

I’m just now finishing up two weeks of design observation in Japan. My one sentence summary:

omfg.

I’ve always liked Japanese design, but I don’t think I could understand why until a few years of design school and a couple of weeks in Tokyo. Design is a part of everyday life here, in a way the west doesn’t get just yet. For one example, do a search for “tenegui” and check out the complex history of a simple piece of cloth.

Over the next few weeks I’ll try and summarize what I’ve learned/discovered during two weeks in Japan.

Technorati Tags: design, japan