Design Matters

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who participated in our Power Manager survey and shared some of their thoughts in the comments. We’ve gotten some good feedback and you may see some of it incorporated in a forthcoming revised interface.

David Hill

Last night at 10:00 PM EST the Cooper-Hewitt announced the winner of the People’s Design Award. ThinkPad was in the hunt for the top honor hanging with the top five nominees for days. The final winner was the TOMS shoe. The design, based on a traditional Argentine shoe, is arguably less important than the humanitarian aspect. For every pair purchased the company donates a pair to a child in need. Congratulations to them.

ThinkPad ended up in the fourth spot, beating out every other computer design nominated. It’s also noteworthy that ThinkPad topped the iPhone, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Corvette, and even the pyramids. Thanks to all the ThinkPad loyalists who voted for our product.

David Hill

I just wanted to take a moment to let my readers know that I will be participating in the ThinkLive webcast event, put on by our friends over at NotebookReview.com. We’ll have some interesting discussions celebrating the 15th Anniversary of ThinkPad. I plan on bringing the rarely seen original ThinkPad design concept model from our archives.

You can register here and please join us at 2pm EST October 10th. U.S. residents who register are also eligible to win a ThinkPad Reserve Edition.

David Hill

Earlier in the year I blogged about the Yamato design center and showed pictures and a detailed diagram of the facility where the ThinkPad designers work. Now that the construction dust has finally settled and we have moved into our Morrisville design center, I thought I would share similar information about where my other team works. The design center is perched on the 5th floor of building one at our Morrisville headquarters. Our design gallery is directly behind the large Lenovo logo that is suspended from the glass curtain wall. Adjacent to the gallery is a studio space where we all sit, a model shop for constructing quick study models and prototypes, a usability lab for testing hardware and software, and a dramatic design gallery for displaying works in progress.

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This is shot peeking into the design gallery where we keep all the secret stuff I can’t show you. The freestanding monolithic walls provide a sense of mystery and screen the view.

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This is where we often meet to discuss and create new design concepts. If you look closely on the table you can see a glimpse of a glass serving container for the three types of TrackPoint caps. You never know when you might need a new one in the middle of a meeting. The chairs are the Think Chair manufactured by Steelcase.

We often bring customers into the center for guided tours and to get feedback on concepts we are working on. Enjoy.

David Hill

Dear Lenovo Blogs readers,
I just wanted to take a quick moment to let you know we are back up & running. Everything came through the transition well and we are back in the swing of things.

Tim Supples

Dear Readers,
LenovoBlogs will be undergoing scheduled maintenance this weekend, beginning at 3pm EST. This will allow us to continue providing reliable access to the blogs as well as more easily adding new enhancements & features.

During this period of maintenance, no new posts will be published and comments will be frozen. We expect everything to go live again Monday or Tuesday of the coming week, of course depending on any technical hangups along the way. Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend

Tim Supples

What a reaction to the post and poll about stripes and ThinkPad. You clearly have a position on stripes and we agree. We plan on putting the stripes back at the earliest date possible. Changes like this are complex due to tooling costs, lead times, and other manufacturing or supply chain constraints. We plan on continued use of this blog as a forum for discussing ThinkPad future design. Thanks for the feedback.

David Hill

Lots of ink about the reported 15th birthday of ThinkPad being last week . The truth is that the first ThinkPad notebook, the 700C, was launched October 5, 1992. Although we are clearly proud of the rapidly approaching milestone, the birthday cake order is a bit premature, unless of course you count the tablet mentioned in several articles. Anyway we are still developing and evolving the iconic design. Hopefully this blog helps us to make the right design decisions. Thanks.

David Hill

The Reserve Edition is now available for puchase by exclusive invitation to those customers demanding the ultimate user experience. The entire offering is described at great length on the microsite. There will be a gallery posted on the microsite soon, but I thought I would share here now. The images show both the exterior and the interior. The interior is what the demanding ThinkPad users have come to love: TrackPoint, best of breed keyboard, and the return of the ultimate in a rubberized finish palmrest. Although the gallery preview is focused on hardware and premium leather binding, the included executive class support package is simply amazing.

ThinkPad Reserve Edition Gallery Preview

David Hill

I realize that I have created a great deal of discussion and speculation regarding the ThinkPad Reserve website link I posted. Although I really can’t say a lot about what this offering is, I thought it would be useful to at least tell what it is not. I hope this helps.

The ThinkPad Reserve Edition is not:

• Yoga
• Just hardware
• Endorsed by Ricardo Montalban
• Glued on patches of leather
• Pleather
• For everyone

David Hill