Design Matters

I recently went to a family wedding in Dallas, braving both the high heat and traffic. While I was there I spent some time visiting a good friend of mine who I've known since we were in 4th grade. He and I share interest in many things including offroad motorcycles, art, design and modern architecture. Interesting combination. He and his wife live in a great mid-century modern house constructed in 1954.

The great thing about this house is how wonderful it still looks and feels. Natural horizontal stone, driftwood grey wooden siding, and the low roofline make the house appear like it was part of the landscape. The house across the street is owned by a local architect who painstakingly restored his version to period perfection. Interestingly this architect drove through the neighborhood trying to buy houses based on their design, including my friend's. The point in this is that design with strong ideas and authenticity of execution continue to demonstrate their staying power.

Not sure there will ever be the same interest in the typical tract house from the 50's. I'm sure they were lower cost, easy to manufacture, but not anywhere near as interesting to live in or as desirable.

 David Hill

One of my interests is creating and collecting things that embody a unique synergy between form and function. Many designers are fascinated with pure aesthetics and will quickly trade off function to achieve their goal. For me these two ideas should not be considered separately. In fact, designers should search for ways to create both.

Pure form as illustrated by this famous chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1918 is strikingly beautiful, but is it comfortable to sit in? It's more of a three dimensional Mondrian painting than it is relaxing place to sit.

Pure function on the other hand,  can solve many problems in seemingly clever ways. This telephone pole for instance is made from natural materials, is recyclable, low cost, easily deployed, and can be quickly viewed from the ground for disconnected lines or other problems. This sounds great on paper, but do you want one in your backyard?

One of my favorites that embodies this idea is the London Underground map. Lets face it, nearly every subway map in the world has copied the fundamental concept behind this masterpiece. It was originally designed by the electrical engineer Henry Beck in 1933 who envisioned the subway lines to be similar to a circuit diagram. Today London is full of gift shops selling T shirts, ash trays, and posters suitable for framing with the map proudly displayed. You can even download a wallpaper copy for your computer from the offical website. Who says you have to be a professional artist or designer to create great art?   

 David Hill

It would wrong to get this blog started without talking about Richard Sapper. He is the design genius behind the original ThinkPad and many other design classics. Richard’s biography can be found here.  He is most noted for his masterpiece of form and function the Tizio lamp . Introduced in 1972,  the Tizio and has been in continuous production ever since.

Often described as a “the man who has never made a bad design” , Richard created the original ThinkPad design concept in the early 90's. Richard often describes the design as being inspired by the Japanese Bento box – the traditional lacquered “lunch box” that is a masterpiece in itself of simplicity and beauty.

Richard is also known for his classic designs for Brionvega, Mercedes, Alessi, Knoll, and Lamy. 

Dialog 1

Interesting to note that several of his television and radio designs from the 1960's can still be purchased today nearly in their original form.We’re glad Richard is still involved with our design team helping to steer our design directions. If you are interested in reading more about Richard I suggest you check out this book.

David Hill

It’s common to launch a corporate blog with the usual noble statements of intent, rules of engagement, and pledges to listen. Let’s skip past all that. Lenovo already listens. We watch the conversation about our company and our products as closely as possible. We reach out, proactively, to customers who use this medium to express their happiness and unhappiness. That’s all been happening. We follow the conversation closely, have been commenting publically in recent months, and gauging what the effect will be on our customer relations and service and support organization with some caution.

Now we’re blogging.

This blog, Design Matters, is about Design. It is not the only blog that Lenovo intends to launch. We don’t believe that a single catch-all blog can handle the complexity of our business, of our customers’ needs, and the challenges of becoming a new world company in a very competitive marketplace. Why did we choose to launch our first blog around the topic of design? Why didn’t we launch a CEO blog or a customer service blog first?

Lenovo is focused on design. We believe design and innovation matters in the PC industry, that there still remains before us a huge opportunity to deliver excellence in PC through design, engineering, quality control, and premium services. The acquisition last year of IBM’s Personal Computer Division was about acquiring the best brand in computing – the original IBM-standard PC and the legendary ThinkCentre and ThinkPad line of products. 

So we’re making our debut with a conversation about design, about the features and details that go into our products. The details that differentiate us. Features that many of our customers aren’t even aware exist. 

Example. The keyboard light, aka the ThinkLight. If you’re sitting at a Thinkpad reading this, try pressing “FN” and “PgUp” at the same time. Look at the top edge of the screen. See the light? If you already knew about the key light, then apologies for insulting your intelligence, but internally we’re amazed at how few people know about the feature.

 David Hill, the man behind this blog, tells the story of attending an engineering conference. A noted expert on lighting and ergonomics stood at the podium, Thinkpad ready to run his slides, and apologized to the audience as he tried to get his slides onto the screen that he couldn’t see his keyboard with the lowered lights. David got up on stage, pressed the two keys, and voila, the presenter could see his keyboard.  He's going to use this space to talk about the thinking that goes into our products, the R&D, the philosophy that drives Lenovo's design teams. It's his space, one that will span our global design expertise in Yamato, Japan, Beijing, and the Research Triangle, one he will share with our design gurus around the world.

But I digress. Back to Lenovo’s blog strategy. Do we have one? Sure, but it isn’t fully baked. We have another blog in the development stage. We hope to launch it within a month or so. The most crucial blog is doubtlessly going to be the online complaint and suggestion box, aka our Service and Support blog. That’s a key one in our opinion, one that in the words of one of our colleagues, is going to be opening “Pandora’s box.” Doubtlessly, in the time between the launch of this blog and the debut of a service blog, a lot of you are going to use comments to say, “Hey, where’s my order?” or “Why are there dead pixels on my screen?” or “I hate Chinese companies.” Fair enough. Just keep in mind that David is the head of design, not the head of support. We’re working to make sure that all complaints – either blogged on your blog or posted here – are addressed. This is not a service and support blog.

The conversational model of marketing at the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto, inspired me to write on my personal blog some thoughts about the role of service and support in this new world order. The impact on how we conduct our support services will doubtlessly be transformed by this, and we need to build up the capacity to not only listen and support this communications channel.

So stay tuned, have at it, and let me know what needs to be done.

 
David Churbuck

VP Global Web Marketing.

dchurbuck@us.lenovo.com

cell phone 508 360 6147 

In case you wondered, the red things in the masthead are TrackPoint caps, the most important touch point and iconic brand signature element for every ThinkPad.

Why did I decide to use the Trackpoint as this blog’s signature?  The Trackpoint technology was invented by Edwin “Ted” Selker, a former IBM Fellow now heading the Context Aware Computing Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Richard Sapper made it red. This was done under protest by the IBM standards department since red was a color reserved strictly for the emergency power off switch. Richard, not one to give up on his idea,  slowly tweaked the color from a magenta (IBM standards approved) to the now familiar bright red. This was all done without them noticing during the early development process. Richard is a clever guy. Given the importance of the iconic red dot to ThinkPad, I decided it was fitting to give it the marquee position on Design Matters.

The first Trackpoint caps were a smooth rubber that provided limited traction and quickly wore out. Subsequently, a rough textured version was invented that is often called the "cat's tongue". Very fitting name. Today all ThinkPads come with three Trackpoint caps. The "cat's tongue", and two soft rubber versions. One has a dimpled surface for better traction, and another with a slight lip for added mechanical advantage. The important thing is that we give the customer choice. Imagine what it would be like if we all had to wear the same shoes.

People are very passionate about pointing device preferences. The world is just about evenly split between TrackPoint and touch-pad loyalists. This is why we offer both on all of our ThinkPads, with exception of the ultra-portable X series, where space is too tight for both. The Wikipedia says touch-typists prefer the TrackPoint because it’s the only pointing device that lets them keep their hands on the keyboard’s home row. In case you are curious, I am strong TrackPoint loyalist. Surprised?