October 1987 | Blueprint

Aesthetics of the new machine age

The shape of products to come depends more on economics and technology than on cosmetic design

By the middle of next year, the US Air Force will have awarded contracts to a number of companies for the development of an aircraft cockpit that has, as Aviation Week & Space Technology so delightfully puts it, ‘the potential to give the US a quantum leap in its ability to meet the projected threats of the 21st century’. The ‘super cockpit’ – or, inevitably, the ‘cockpit of the future’ – will develop in three phases. Model No 1, ready for testing in 1990, will have head-aimed fire control and a 120° head-up display, complete with night vision, built into the pilot’s helmet. In Model No 2, to be tested in 1993, the pilot will have projected on to his lap a three-dimensional ‘God’s eye view’ display of how his plane looks from 20,000 feet up. Head, eye and voice control of systems will be integrated in this phase. In super cockpit No 3, the pilot will have an electronic ‘associate’ to give oral advice, using expert systems and artificial intelligence. No 3 will also have a special system to improve the pilot’s performance, and another to recover his plane automatically whenever it spots him blacking out under heavy Gs.

Six degrees of freedom

The visual and aural images supplied to the pilot will form a ‘virtual world’ independent of the one he can see through his windshield. The heart of the cockpit is a magnetic helmet tracking system with six degrees of freedom. This ensures that the images and directional sounds reaching the pilot’s eyes and ears are stabilised while he is, say, slumped in his seat and yawning. Finally, helmets with built-in display generators will act as the flight simulators of the 1990s. Compared to the flight simulators of old, they will cut the cost of training USAF pilots, and make it cheaper to rehearse missions.

The day may yet come when Caspar Weinberger lashes up a cockpit helmet in the White House and ‘flies’ all the way to Teheran. But the Air Force programme is cited here not for its ghoulishness, but rather because it gives a hint of the general direction of product development today. We are in an era of the man/machine interface. Philips has promised, too, that we will all soon be watching picture-in-picture TVs and, a little later, wall TVs: we are entering the era of the simulator. Interactive video has begun to sweep through salesman induction courses and Dayton-Hudson department stores. Slick talkers at America’s daily round of 33 million corporate presentations will rely less on flip-charts, more on slides they’ve knocked up on their Apple Macintosh 2s back home.  The ‘virtual world’ of the super cockpit will, in varying proportions, be available at home, in the office, and at the watering holes of the 1990s. 

The USAF’s smart helmets reveal a third trend in product design. Alternating between use on the ground and use in the air, they remind us that tomorrow’s consumer goodies will have to work in a variety of different contexts. Small, portable, silent, discreet, powerful, they show that we are in the epoch of products as mobile pet chameleons. These are the kind of products which sho how right the Harvard Business Review was not so long ago, when an article in it was headlined with the title ‘YOUR OFFICE IS WHERE YOU ARE’.

Already we have portable fax machines at £900. They fuse telecommunications and computing, like everything else: you take them with your suitcase into foreign hotels. Or, from November, you can go to Tokyo, buy a Casio VS-101 floppy disc camera, take 50 colour shots of the cityscape in just 10 seconds, and play them all back later on your TV in Britain. The VS-101 weighs two pounds. 

Are these really the kind of products people will want to own in the closing years of the second millennium? Perhaps not: but in the consumer products of the future, multidisciplinary planning teams, expert in the man-machine interface and in the dynamics of consumption, will be a more powerful force than the consumer himself. It will be up to the industrial designer to represent the consumer; yet even designers are but one of a wider range of forces that are likely to render recent visions of ‘lifestyle-driven’, consumer-specified designs largely utopian.

Cheap short runs

It is fashionable to argue that the arrival of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) in industry will make possible a level of inexpensive ‘customisation’ not seen since the days of handicrafts. In this scenario, the ‘perpetual innovation economy’ of the Japanese multinationsals is so automated that they can engage in continuous new product development. What’s more, the cheap, short production runs made possible by programmable production lines ensure that these new products can be assembled according to specifications set by consumers. At last, we’re told, humanity is on the edge of a historic reconciliation of The Crafts with mass production. Fom here on in, if you want a hi-fi or a dressing-table in pink spots,, you can have one.

A variant of the FMS thesis is that individual-genius industrial designers will from now on determine the shape of products to come. But as we shall see, the realities of technology and economics are more powerful forces for change than either Flexible Manufacturing or Ettore Sottsass. In particular, the installed base of FMS remains tiny: only companies attempting to reach truly ‘global’ markets can afford it. As for linking everything to the consumer, only a Nissan can get you a boy-racer driver’s seat with any expedition. Craft production? Forget it.

Even though they design products for global markets, industrial designers like John Besford of Fitch & Co and John Stoddard, of Moggridge Associates acknowledge that, compared with FMS or their personal whims, other factors are more vital to the design of consumer goods. Besford draws attention to flat-screen technology, such as that employed on the Toshiba T5100, a 12lb, portable hard disc computer with a flip-up gas plasma display. A designer of pink cordless telephones himself, Besford praises cordless irons and cordless ‘personal care products’ (hair-curlers, etc), and talks of the urgent need to develop small, rechargeable batteries. For his part, Stoddard eulogises touch-screen interactive terminals in which ‘soft keys’ – on-screen icons whose function can be changed at will – figure prominently. Developments such as these are at least as singficant as flexible manufacturing, and will probably alter the nature of industrial design more than Memphis ever could.

Designers will, however, benefit from the aesthetic freedoms today’s technologies allow them.  Stoddard contends that computer-aided design and manufacture are more fun to work with than the drawing board: ‘You can rearrange the elements of a car stereo fascia at will. In general CAD frees you up to repeat more complex, more decorative details than in the past’. Besford waxes lyrical about the new ways of mounting electronic circuits all over the inside surfaces of complex plastics shapes: product casings, he suggests, will soon be as clever as the ‘smart cards’ now used in financial and security systems.

If aesthetic freedoms are wider, won’t the idiosyncratic styles of particular designers dominate the gadgets of the next decade? Yes: but while a thousand styles will bloom, uniformity will dominate. We will be given the aesthetic of a box of tricks – compact, collapsible, one that can be ‘re-interfaced’ by people using TV remote control units. Better English, less cute graphics: these will clarify the products around us. When the sums are one day done, cultish, personalised surface patterns, ordered from flexible assembly lines, will count for less than mass, low-cost appropriateness.

Cults out, brands in

As working from home spreads, so the lines between consumer and contract furniture will grow fuzzy. In general, furniture, like electronic equipment, will help blur the boundaries between different environments. It will help form a pan-everything aesthetic, in which the mobile, telecommunications-connected workaholic darts around for longer hours, looking for maximum comfort and some decent upholstery.

In appliances, consumer electronics and cars, the trick will be to get reliability and quality right, rather than to worry about aesthetics. Which? reports that most washing machines still go wrong in their first four years’ of use, and that brands like Bosch (dishwashers), Hotpoint (tumble driers, freezers) and Hitachi (TVs) are still much more reliable than Servis, Tricity, Ferguson or Hoover. In home entertainment, JVC’s high-quality Super VHS video pictures are likely to do more by way of forcing improvements in TV definition than a dozen talented graduates from the Royal College of Art. And in General Motors’ drive to retrieve profitability leadership (lost this year, for the first time, to Ford) and a 44 per cent US market share (down to 37 per cent since 1982), no-leak engines will be just as vital as belated innovations in bodywork.

So: elite aesthetics will fade further into insignificance. Yuppies – broadly, workers hooked into the international boom in financial services – form a narrow social base for tomorrow’s aesthetics. Their incomes are stretched. Thus the surge into matt blacks, greys and all the rest will end sooner rather than later..

That tomorrow’s product aesthetics are now anybody’s guess is confirmed by Disney, whose merchandise characters are currently undergoing a revival. Aided and abetted by George Lucas, who has begun to redesign the siren simulations of Disneyland itself, Disney has got Mickey Mouse on to $300 skis, $175 Seiko watches. The example of Disney shows how important brands have become over the years. According to Branding: a key marketing tool (edited by John Murphy, Macmillan, £35), brands, and especially historic American ones, are worth billions.  In the 1890s America founded American Express, Heinz Baked Beans, Quaker Oats, Kodak, Quaker Oats, Sears, Roebuck & Co, Shredded Wheat, Steinway Piano, Studebaker Carriages and Waterman Fountain Pen. The following brands were US brand leaders in 1923 and remain so today: Campbell’s, Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Ever Ready, Gillette, Goodyear, Nabisco, Wrigley. Standard Oil has become Esso (‘S.O.’, then Exxon. In the unremitting rounds of merger mania that are still to come, the value of these brands will be formidable. Much of the product design of the future, therefore, will revolve around the establishment, maintenance or extension of brands -– mundane, but cost-effective.

Robots from China

FMS automation shouldn’t be written off: even populous China plans to start making robots in Chenyang next year, and hopes for exports in the longer term. However progress in FMS depends on prodigious research expenditures into machine vision. And at present, the world would have to build 100,000 supercomputers to get near the capacities of the human eye.

The snags in factories are still legion. Because 70 per cent of the manufacturing cost of a product reduces to how it’s designed, more and more products will be contoured with manufacturability in mind. Top pocket telephones made by Motorola, for example, because they will have only 200 parts and a lithium battery designed down to weigh one ounce. Indeed, manufacturability is such an issue now that artificial intelligence programs are already being sold as a means of improving it (see Ken Swift, Knowledge-based design for manufacture, Kogan Page, £14.95). That may accelerate a broad convergence between different product styles.

Deindustrialisation also has consequences. ‘Service’ companies – Disney, Citibank and several of the brands discussed above – are strong determinants of our visual landscape: they provide a dominating background culture to product design. By 1992, it is estimated, computer giants like IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard and NCR will generate about half their revenues through services, not products. The branding and corporate identity of financial services will also improve and have effect. Products and systems designed to improve personal and security services will mushroom (see box). McDonald’s may win worldwide sales of up to 150 burgers a second. Above all, American Airlines’ bizarre Sabre travel booking network, driven by the largest private mainframe in the world, will exert a massive influence on the way we live and on the kind of environment that products and their owners will move around in.

Installed for $350m, Sabre now earns American the same sum each year – a third of the airline’s operating profit. Sabre handles nearly half the USA’s flight reservations and a fifth of its car rental bookings. It reserves hotels, is active in Japan, and has signed a deal to help Harry Goodman’s Air Europe. With its new Capture system, it now offers companies employees’ travel and expenses reporting.

Sabre is not alone. Federal Express has introduced a scanning, logging and telecommunications network that can track a parcel anywhere round the world. Unseen grids like these will do much more to change the world of consumption than exotic manufacturing systems.

Many of the trends depend for their impetus on the USA. Since this time last year, the low dollar has helped America mount an unprecedented export offensive. In 1986, America sold Italy more than a million pairs of shoes, up 23 per cent on 1985. American cars are now shipped across the Atlantic to Europe. One decade on from launching the PC, American computer firms are the main companies enjoying the worldwide revival in PC sales after the doldrums of the past two years.

More and more of our time will be spent in the office. Here, what we work and sit on will be American. It will be made by Herman Miller, Steelcase, or by Sunar, a 4000-strong company based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Sunar’s European chief, Ian Davies, believes in FMS. In systems furniture, as it happens, he may be right. Davies says that Japanese and Italian metalworking and machine tools, together with the more professional management of technology, have conspired to make customisation a real possibility. He cites the example of a highly expensive tool bought by Knoll International, which allowed it to fashion a lifetime’s worth of joints for Richard Sapper chairs in the space of a few months. Now the tool can be turned to other tasks.

Davies says that, in systems furniture, we are in for an era of soft cuddly materials, woods, sensuous outers more than hi-tech inners and ‘reversible raincoats’. For Sunar, design consultant Douglas Ball is working on a partitioning system in which the opacity of the glass can be controlled electronically. Like a display, in fact.

Born in the ROK

This is all great, and testimony to America’s continuing strengths in the world of products. But as Davies concedes, low-cost, low-tech manufacture in the Third World is the corollary to FMS-built furniture in industrialised countries. Sunar itself has a factory in South Korea.

South Korea is now the world’s leading exporter of ships, shoes and microwave ovens. In 20 years, Daewoo has grown from a tiny maker of shirts to a $10 billion conglomerate building chips, planes, telecoms, cars, computers and CD players. It is true that the Japanese are more powerful: this year, for instance, Japanese factories based in Europe will make more VCRs than Grundig, Philips and SEL combined. But the Koreans are now beginning to dominate small car markets all over the world.

Look out for Hyundai and Samsung, look out for South Korea. They are likely to influence products more than you or I will.

Service products

Joseph P Engleberger, founder of Unimation, has recently announced that he, too, is quitting manufacturing for the service sector. His hilariously-named Transitions Research Corp, of Bethel, Connecticut, will launch a $20,000 robot vacuum cleaner next year, for use over 35,000 sq ft or more: in supermarkets, shopping centres, factories and airports.

Engleberger is sponsored in this endeavour by Electrolux, the world’s largest manufacturer of domestic appliances. He has the support of Du Pont, 3M, Johnson Wax and Emhart. He will bring out $25,000 waiter robots for hospitals in 1989, and, given another $20m backing, $50,000 all-purpose household robots after that. The affluent old are likely to emerge as a key market for service robots.

Another set of products to avoid encountering are biometric security systems. Expect your fingerprints to be checked when you use some Automatic Telling Machines in Japan next year ($500 scanning attachment by Identix, of Palo Alto). Stay clear of Stellar Systems, Santa Clara: it will measure and remember the shape of your hand. Finally, don’t try to fool American Airlines’ new, 110,000 square feet earthquake-proof computer centre, built underneath Tulsa. It will scan the blood vessels in your retina and check your weight before it lets you in.