The Bento Box
I thought I’d introduce myself to the readers of Design Matters by discussing the original inspiration for the design of the ThinkPad — the Bento-Bako (lunch box)
In Japan we refer to any thin, square, and handy box as a Bento-Bako, and the color is nearly always black. If it is a "special" box, then it is referred to as a Makunouchi Bento which is a more suitable metaphor for the ThinkPad. Bento refers more specifically to the contents of the box. The WikiPedia defines Bento as:
"Bent? (?? or ?????) is a single-portion takeout meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables as a side dish. Containers range from disposable mass produced to hand crafted lacquerware. While bento are readily available at convenience stores and bento shops (???, bent?-ya) throughout Japan, it is still considered an essential skill of a Japanese housewife to be able to prepare an appealing boxed lunch."
The ThinkPad concept was born out of a collaboration with Richard Sapper, and we believe a ‘black box’ is one of the most beautiful package concepts Richard has ever advanced from his studio. Richard "predicted" the design in 1969 with his famous television set — the black ST201 manufactured by Brionvega.
The concept of thin black box was, and continues to be perfect for a notebook PC and I am proud we've been able to keep the initial concept at the core of the ThinkPad's design from its introduction in the early '90s until today. Can you think of any product whose package concept hasn't changed in more than 20 years? While some very niche products may have remained constant; in our industry we change components and technologies almost twice a year, but the fundamental design concept at the heart of the ThinkPad has always remained the same.
When we started ThinkPad, IBM did not allow the use of black for its products' body color. Why? Because the DIN standard (DIN is the German Institute for Standardization) did not accept the color black for office products. We have to satisfy all the global requirements and we also had to adhere to a design guideline to keep consistency for all IBM products. The concept of global design standards such as DIN is great but for the designers in the Far East area, it was felt to be a strong limitation to archive new and innovative designs. The design guideline was supposed to dictate the design of "big" office equipment, not small portable devices. We designed several transportable products within IBM's design guidelines before the ThinkPad. They were okay, but not very attractive in my opinion, so for the products designed for personal use, we felt we needed a completely new concept. That concept became the ThinkPad.
The design essence of the ThinkPad was, and still is, a black box with a colorful logo plate, enough, in my opinion, for a distinctive exterior. If you open the screen you will always find the newest technology, the best usability, and even more rich design details in the box. We would like to keep this concept for a long time and haven't strayed from the concept in over twenty years.
I will finish with a piece of design trivia: you may think the red Trackpoint cap is one of the most recognizable design points for the ThinkPad but early ThinkPad’s offered black TrackCapsas an accessory. Maybe the Red TrackPoint was to flashy for us at that time. Today, we're all red.
Lenovo Meet the Modder Dean Liou
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 2
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 1
Lenovo H320 desktop
October 17th, 2006 9:59 pm
“Can you think of any product whose package concept hasn’t changed in more than 20 years?”
The Porsche 911 comes to mind. The ThinkPad is in good company.
October 18th, 2006 3:10 am
For the sake of all that’s good, don’t reintroduce the black trackpoint, if for no other reason than I would be immediately compelled to buy a set for my X41 tablet and my desktop ThinkPlus keyboard with ultranav, and there goes another $20… Introducing color options in trackpoints would be the easiest way to deprive me of my finances.
October 18th, 2006 9:11 am
Where we are talking about those recognizable design points, I do miss the red and blue color stripes on the ThinkPad trackpoint/navbar buttons a lot. These little discreet color accents (beside the the red Trackpoint cap) always made ThinkPads more distinguishable from other brand notebooks.
October 18th, 2006 8:29 pm
The more I actually use the 60 systems the more I prefer it without the trackpoint button colours. I love the bento box inspiration – i really want all angles, curves and colours removed from the new models – all right angles like the 760 with the size/technology of the T60 would be ideal
October 18th, 2006 9:57 pm
The shown Brionvega TV reminds me to the “NeXT cube” I once had. My old ThinkPad 770 in contrast here looks more like a “NeXT station” (the black Pizza box) or at least shares some similarities with that.
However, some little colour stripes on otherwise deep black areas don’t hurt, especially if these can be seen as corporate design identity accents.
October 21st, 2006 6:59 am
I do love the red Trackpoint caps. However, I do also sorely miss the red and blue highlights for the Trackpoint set of buttons. They are a great help when you are in dark conditions and help to illuminate their positions with just the light coming from the screen. This is also greatly enhanced when the Thinklight is turned on. Hope to see future iterations of the ThinkPad retain the original flavour.
October 21st, 2006 7:04 am
I would like to add that in there is a little peeve that I do not understand in the design of the T60s. With this I mean the ease of access to the Memory Slots for upgrading of the RAM. I think that placing them under the keyboard may have been a design constraint, however, I am sure that it could be overcome to allow for a tiny faceplate exposing both slots at the underside of the ThinkPad. This would be very much appreciated as I do believe that the most commonly upgradable component of any laptop would be the RAM.
Just a suggestion.
October 21st, 2006 5:34 pm
ThinkPad design and functionality has become my defacto standrad for judging all other notebooks, including those made by apple.Having said this, functionality out weighs design as one of the most important factors in my notebook purchase plans. I would love to see some new designs in thye Lenovo line of portables, where I think Lenovo can use products to pioneer new concepts.
I love Design Matters and often come back to this blog when I begin thinking about the future of portable computing.
–jim Forbes
October 21st, 2006 9:14 pm
This blackbox is about identity. In the eye of a designer maybe is more like a stagnan process of innovation. But becoming too creative in introducing new shape or color will break the identity that have been kept for so long.
Thinkpad still have its strong design elements that makes it different with the rest in the industry : all black interior, boxy shapes, red dot, etc.
But this identity is easily copied. Some newest HP business notebook start to use all black design for its interior. At a glance it resemblence a thinkpad. The design team in Lenovo will have more challenge to introduce a “new” design without losing the identity.
Oh please dont start making siver thinkpads…
October 21st, 2006 9:15 pm
This blackbox is about identity. In the eye of a designer maybe is more like a stagnan process of innovation. But becoming too creative in introducing new shape or color will break the identity that have been kept for so long.
Thinkpad still have its strong design elements that makes it different with the rest in the industry : all black interior, boxy shapes, red dot, etc.
But this identity is easily copied. Some newest HP business notebook start to use all black design for its interior. At a glance it resemblence a thinkpad. The design team in Lenovo will have more challenge to introduce a “new” design without losing the identity.
Oh please dont start making silver thinkpads…
October 22nd, 2006 1:37 am
A cultural stroke of genius!
Sh?kad? bent?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
October 22nd, 2006 1:10 pm
I always liked and prefered some of the more timeless IBM Thinkpad designs. Especially the design of the X- and T-series are worth a naming here.
However, among older former Thinkpads, there was a asian/japanese market S30 Thinkpad series, which always impressed me too. I once had a chance to take a look on one of those japanese S30/i Series S30 ThinkPads…
http://en.thinkwiki.org/images....._large.jpg
http://img69.imageshack.us/my......07a0ap.jpg
…and loved immediately it’s well thought out design. – Even this S30 ThinkPad series was what we nowadays call an ultra-subnotebook (with a small 10.4″ XGA TFT), it came equiped with a marvelous nearly full-size keyboard and offered a very stylish design.
October 23rd, 2006 9:54 am
Apropos, red trackpoints and designs…
…Lenovo recently got a redDot Award for the very interesting design study “ThinkPad Yonah Convertible”.
Is there still something going on, or was it a one time effort?
I wish, Lenovo would open up a second high-quality line, with focus on another modern design.
October 24th, 2006 6:44 pm
Beeblebrox>
It’s not a Thinkpad, it’s a prototype called Lenovo Yoga.
http://www-06.ibm.com/jp/pc/me.....e/yoga.jpg
Some other real world pictures:
http://www.pconline.com.cn/new.....84948.html
http://notebook.yesky.com/108/2531608_8.shtml
October 29th, 2006 9:32 pm
To me the ThinkPad that best represented this concept was the S30. I loved that design.
It is too bad there seems to be no market for attractive, small and powerful devices like the S30.
I had high hopes that the Z6Xt might become the new S30.
October 30th, 2006 8:37 am
While I like my thinkpad, I just discovered that the red trackpoint has one disadvantage:
It is very fascinating.
I just spent 1/2 hour convincing my two year old, to tell my where she is hiding her new “tressure”…
December 6th, 2006 4:21 am
[...] Here’s an interesting overview, with pictures of the design thinking behind the Thinkpad. [...]
May 17th, 2007 2:51 am
I think they could have kept the design alive by NOT removing the red and blue from the ultranav and trackpoint buttons…It is amazing how much that added to the look of the ThinkPad…
June 13th, 2007 9:27 pm
While I admire Thinkpad’s design and truly think it is timeless, I wish for better approach be used on Thinkpad’s software. It looks outdated even on WinXP and I am not even talking about Vista. Come on guys – don’t you have a good graphical designer? Why not ask them to draw nicer icons for power manager and other programs? Why not ask them to draw nicer pictographs for OSD (like those green ones when changing volume). Why not ask them to draw nice backgrounds for fingerprint configuration and other software. Why not ask them to design application’s UIs instead of letting developers do that. I understand that most thought/design goes to hardware, but poor software UI design and graphics lowers overall perception of the product.
November 29th, 2007 1:11 am
[...] Bento boxes inspired the design of the IBM [...]
July 10th, 2009 12:44 pm
[...] philosophy has had a huge influence on ThinkPad design from day one, even something as simple as a bento box, so it’s no surprise to see the correlation into these innovations found in the T400s. Check [...]