Design Matters

Power, especially the lack of it, is top of mind for any ThinkPad user. I often find myself strangely compelled to scan rooms I am in for available AC outlets. I guess this is a disease that you develop after years of mobile computer use. We have all devised our own strategies for milking the last drop of power out of a rapidly draining battery. To assist ThinkPad owners with this task, we provide the ability to manage power settings using the Power Manager utility. This handy utility sets the balance between things like screen brightness, sound level, and system temperature to optimize power use based on the desired behaviors. Sounds complicated, but it really isn’t if we have done a good job. Our goal is to make it a lot easier than running a nuclear power plant.

We are currently studying a revised user interface and feature set to further improve this utility. I’d like to ask that you take a moment and participate in a brief survey that my team has created. You can take the survey here. Thanks for your valuable time and feed back on this important topic.

David Hill

I recently drove by a local lumber yard while on a weekend motorcycle outing and witnessed one of the saddest architectural statements I have seen in years. Stuck to the front of a warehouse style metal structure was a ridiculously stylized southern colonial facade. It looked as though two buildings were unceremoniously sawed in half and fused together with no respect paid to either party. There was clearly no attempt to blend or transition the joining. Dr. Frankenstein would be very proud of this one. It makes me wonder how such a thing could have been created. Did an architect actually think this one up? I’m guessing not. The architect was more likely asked to design the building with the warmth of a fine colonial, but on a prefab metal building budget. This is where the impossible task comes in.

Great design is generally not made by magically blending two totally dissimilar concepts or styles. This is where keen design leadership skill is required to sell the client on what the real problem is and what it is not. A well armed designer can clearly  address the budget issues faced by the client,  but they must not lose sight of the final design result.  Designers need to recognize this dileama and avoid painful design operations like this one. I’m sure it would have been possible to design a pure metal building with a more human or warm quality and stayed within budget. I don’t think anyone is really fooled by this design facade.

David Hill

We just introduced a Think branded line of servers targeted at SMB customers. The design is an extension of I look I have championed for years. The authentic appearance, simple geometric forms, powerful air inlets and black color just works. Our move into servers is much more than hardware. We include some great software tools that makes managing servers far easier for small business. Most small business users just don’t have sophisticated IT departments. Here are the easy to use tools we developed:

• ThinkServer EasyStartup – Designed to simplify initial configuration.
• ThinkServer EasyUpdate – Allows the user to easily identify, download and install hardware and firmware updates.
• ThinkServer EasyManage – A system monitoring, administration and management tool that allows the user to oversee the performance of one or multiple servers from a single console.

You can take a peek at the ThinkServer hardware in the gallery here.

David Hill

Having lived through the design of the X300 it’s very easy to fall in love with thin and light. Beauty, however, is in the eye of the beholder. Not everyone is bent on owning an ultraportable, even the richly featured X300. There is a certain type of user who demands ultimate power over all other attributes. As people in fields such as digital content creation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, digital photography and science fields become increasingly mobile, they are demanding the full-featured performance of a desktop workstation in a mobile workstation. In a nutshell, they want extreme performance, not wafer thin.

Today we announced what I think these demanding customers are looking for. The ThinkPad W700 takes extreme performance and user experience to new levels. This thing is a 17″ wide screen nitro burning funny car. You can read all the speeds and feeds details here. In addition to the amazing under the hood specs, there are pioneering features that interest me as a designer.

As an option we include the industry’s first built-in palm rest digitizer and color calibrator. Designed for digital content creators and users, the mobile workstation’s digitizer helps them easily configure an image, either mapping it to the entire screen or to an area defined by the user. We used the same stylus as our ThinkPad tablet. High performance users, especially digital photographers, will love the models with the built-in color calibrator. Being able to see accurate color is very important to designers. The calibrator automatically adjusts the display’s color in up to half the time of many external calibrators and with higher accuracy. The end result is highly accurate, true-to-life images in an integrated easy to use package. The optional 400-nit WUXGA display provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstation models, and the 72 percent wide color gamut provides more than 50 percent greater color intensity. The image quality is stunning.

Designing this one was a big challenge, no pun intended. We spent a lot of time determining the size of the palm rest, digitizer pad size and position. As usual there is not a single wasted cubic millimeter inside the W700. Even a machine of this size goes through the same level of analysis and tradeoffs for the placement of every component. Just because the puzzle pieces are larger it doesn’t make finding the ultimate solution easier.

Okay it’s big, but more importantly it’s a beast. I think this one will have great appeal for designers or anyone else who wants extreme performance.

David Hill

Ask most any ThinkPad fan what pointing device they prefer and the answer will be unanimous: the trademark TrackPoint. A group of CNET editors came together recently asking the same question about a “new ultraportable laptop” that is equipped with a “pointing stick, but no touch pad.” I wonder which laptop it could be.

Head over to the CNET post and let them know which pointing device you prefer, and tell them where you came from.

David Hill

I just read an article at Sitepoint written by Josh Catone that ranks corporate blogs from around the world. As the official first Lenovo blogger I must say that I was very proud to see us in the number two spot. We have worked hard to publish relevant information and create an open dialogue via comments, polls, and surveys. I don’t have a squad of professional writers cranking out sanitized “corporate messages”. Design Matters is the real thing. Thanks to all my readers for your continued interest and support. Here is the copy about Lenovo.

Lenovo – The great collection of blogs from computer maker Lenovo demonstrate that the company really understands blogging. Lenovo intersperses posts about its product line with musings about business, design, life, and technology. Definitely don’t miss the Design Matters blog, which should be a must-read for any designer.

You can read the complete article here.

David Hill

Designers are always looking for new and creative ways to solve the problems they face. Ideas are often inspired by things we see, own, or have used. A few months ago I started a weekly event within my team called “The Design of the Week.” The idea is that designers bring in something that inspires them from a design perspective, talk about it in front of the entire team, and then place it on a display pedestal for a week as a reminder and conversation piece. It’s a bit like a design show and tell. The feedback from my team has been very positive. We’ve all learned something in the process and it has been great fun.

I kicked off the first session by showing a great Sake carafe from Japan. It’s a blown glass form that has a embedded glass chamber that suspends and isolates the ice from the Sake so that it can’t be diluted by melting ice. There is nothing worse than a diluted Sake. Some of the designs brought in by my team include a unique coat rack that suspends from the ceiling with aircraft cable, a LED flashlight that stands on it’s own tripod, a cork screw that resembles a set of brass knuckles, and a classic claw hammer with a wonderful stacked leather handle.

We intend to keep this going throughout the year as a  source for design inspiration. We may possibly switch in 2009 to the “Bad design of the Week” to honor the things that frustrate us most. I’ll continue to share some of the designs as the year progresses.

David Hill