It Is Strong, It Is Beautiful, It Is Useful; It Was Designed Meticulously.
Painstaking Design (Part 2)
In seven days, NO, SIX DAYS GOD created heaven and earth and all that is in them — that is what my christian leanings have taught me to believe. This Christian faith teaches me that this God cares about the details. Case in point, in Exodus 36:8–39,43, there is an outlining of the precision with which elements were brought together to build the LORD’s house — the Tabernacle. How is it that the edifice was that precise? It was so because a design was provided in the first place by GOD Himself — specifying what to use for what. Okay, let me focus on the main write-up now, lest I deviate into the realms of my religious beliefs.
Do you recall that in my last submission on painstaking design 1, I made mention of the vitruvian virtues? If you don’t recall it, or have not read it yet, you’d be in a better place to follow this write-up if you read it. Just refer here.
In this submission, I’ll try to throw some light on each of the three legs of the vitruvian virtues and why each one goes to the heart of building a desirable product. Durability, Utility, and Beauty are the three underpinnings of what makes a product useful to the end user, or the client — according to Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.
Durability: my first self-bought footwear
As a child in the University of Ghana Primary and Junior Secondary Schools I was surrounded by a lot of friends who had a keen interest in footwear and how often they could change them. Well, I wasn’t too bothered to have such “fantasies’’ because of the home I came from — we just had enough as kids for school — nothing more, nothing less. If you needed something extra, save for it. One time, I wanted to get a specific shoe for myself — I was in Form 2 or so, so I saved for it. When I hit my target I went to the market with some friends to purchase the sneakers. Novices as we were, we could not pick out the high quality ones to select from, and the merchant could not be bothered so far as he got his money.
Guess what, within two weeks my new footwear was brittle at the sole, and was out by the third week. What had happened? What had gone wrong? My thinking then as a child was that I did not get a quality product. Was that really the case? Well, growing up, and going through computing school after my degree I have come to analyse the situation differently, but my “breakthrough” moment on what the problem could have been, came when Kofi Dadzie, my former boss and professional mentor, introduced me to the Vitruvian principles — he asked me to always design and specify products in a manner that covers as many scenarios as possible — covering every exception no matter how minute. He said in specifying what the product should look like (length, breadth, symmetry, asymmetry, capacity, etc) you free up the engineer’s mind from thinking about what to implement and rather let him focus on how to implement it.
How did what Kofi taught me provide answers to my childhood question of why my shoe got spoiled so quickly? I am now of the notion that the designer of my footwear did not, or perhaps could not, fully envisage the rigorous changes that came with the storage of the sneaker till it was sold. Whereas the anticipation would have been that these shoes are moved out of the storage unto the store shelves till they are sold, the reality in Ghana is that most of the traders in these shoes bring out their merchandise daily for display and sales and send them back to storage at the close of the day. Storage here is normally a sack (jute) loaded with a lot of other footwear. The problem this presents is that there is a daily change in the moisture surrounding the shoes, something that if had been anticipated and tackled in design, would have led to a material capable of handling rapid changes in the daily environment of the shoes being used. The inability to cover this scenario meant that the shoes were not durable enough for my environment. My first lesson in design, courtesy Kofi, solved a childhood puzzle for me.
And oh, now that I have mentioned Kofi, the company he co-founded with Ehizogie Binitie, Rancard, will be twenty (20) years old this April, Hurray!!!.
Beauty: I like what I see, so I’ll try it out
So one may ask, why is beauty such an important factor in product design? Imagine you need a place to stay with your bride when you get married in the next few months, so you go apartment scouting. Your tours around the city of Accra brings you to the Oyibi township. Your inquiries lead you to two adjacent properties — one looks like a poorly designed house, whereas the other looks well layered, has a perfectly crafted shape and outline, amongst others. Which one would you choose? The very essence of design is that its manifestation is pleasing to the eyes. So two friends of mine, Angele and Awoenam make different handicrafts from beads — bags, bracelets, necklaces, among others. I asked them separately, whether they had a particular number of beads they use in making their handicrafts. The answer surprisingly was the same — they both said no, but the main quality they normally seek to present is the uniformity or consistency of the elements. For example if they have to make a bracelet in Ghanaian colours, the balance of the four main colours in the national flag is important — two black beads in the middle, three gold beads to either side of the black beads, seven green beads to the left of the gold beads and, seven red beads to its right. What they described to me is a templated design that took presentation (beauty) into consideration. Before your client assesses the durability of your product something must call him/her to it — if your product is beautiful it would.
Utility: I hope it does what it says it will do
How many of you have acquired a new phone, or laptop, or TV, or just-name-it, and quickly dove into that special feature that attracted you to it? I vividly remember the day my mom got her new Galaxy A30 — nothing as fancy as the high end phones — but her first action was to quickly take a picture and see if the quality was indeed better than that of her previous phone. Isn’t it amazing that for a gadget like a phone one of the first things people check is the quality of the shots it takes? Well that is what phones have become — a product of veritable utility — so much so that recently in helping someone pick out a phone the list of specifications she had me go through even meant that phones that came without radios were de-prioritized. In taking a designing approach to products we are making sure that the trending needs of the potential users are what dictate the functionalities of the product — it must be useful to the consumer. There is a reason why laptops and personal computers of today are being produced without CD slots but with more USB ports — because product manufacturers/makers have taken the parameter of utility to the heart of the product cycle — which is the process of specifying requirements and designing the products.
Product design as reiterated in this post, and Painstaking Design 1, is concerned with the most trivial of issues that may cast a product in a bad light. No scenario is too small to consider in the design process as they contribute to making the product durable, beautiful, and useful.
Do not forget, Rancard will be twenty (20) years old in April.
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