This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
This Website Uses Cookies
By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn More
This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
Subscribe
  • Sign In
  • Create Account
  • Sign Out
  • My Account
  • Home
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Digital Editions
    • Subscribe
    • Archives
    • Buyers Guide
    • How-to Guide
  • Web Exclusives
    • APPS
    • Breaking News
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
  • Channels
    • Electronics
    • Mechanical
    • Materials
    • Technology
  • Markets
    • Appliances
    • Electronics
    • HVAC
    • Medical Devices
    • Smart Technology
  • Association Reports
    • AHAM
    • AHRI
    • CEA
    • IDSA
    • Forecasts
    • Shipments
  • More
    • Custom Content & Marketing Services
    • eNewsletters
    • Events
    • Industry Links
    • Job Board
    • Market Research
    • New Products
    • The appliance DESIGN Store
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • IAM
    • International Appliance Manufacturing Magazine
    • IAM Digital Edition Archives
  • Excellence in Design
  • Contact
  • Advertise
Home » The (Re) Birth of Cool
AppliancesIDSATechnologyAssociation Reports

The (Re) Birth of Cool

ApplianceDesign-IDSA-logo.png
March 2, 2018
Lou Lenzi
KEYWORDS appliance design / design awards / design competition / IDEA / industrial design
Reprints
One Comment

The Industrial Designers Society of America’s (IDSA) annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) 2018 is open for entries through March 19 as the competition marks 38 years of recognizing excellence. The awards cover a broad range of industries and disciplines, from commercial and industrial products to leisure, entertainment and children’s products to home including appliances, medical and health, environments and automotive/transportation.

The awards are tier-based with winners awarded at the gold, silver and bronze levels. The winning designs are housed in a permanent collection at the iconic Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, MI, providing a public spotlight for the design firms and corporate design offices behind the award winners and highlighting their role as design thought leaders.

Here we’ll focus our assessment of design trends to the consumer technology category. Consumer tech is a bellwether for how design shapes the artifacts and user-experiences in the midst of one of the most technologically disruptive periods in modern history.

As a collection, IDEA 2017 winners in consumer technology reflect a seriousness of design. Marked by a pervasive use of noble metals, notably polished and brushed aluminum and expanses of high performance glass—these designs are crisp, sharply-tailored and exude a serious, no-nonsense feeling. This purity of materials and finishes—applied to straightforward geometric forms—says “cool” in the same vein as the late jazz legend Miles Davis. Call today’s consumer technology design solutions a (re)birth of cool.

No better example is the gold winning Xiaomi Mi MIX smartphone. Its ceramic case, edgeless glass screen and precise, nearly invisible case gaps are the essence of cool detachment. The earpiece speaker, front-facing camera and distance sensor are incorporated into the case in a way that they seem to disappear from sight. The single physical button is located on the back of the phone and is attached to the ceramic shell by a clever tenon joint, eliminating the use of adhesives or plastic structures. The overall form might be interpreted as a simple geometric shape, but the incredible level of precision in which the details are executed make it highly sophisticated. The Mi MIX, designed by renowned designer Philippe Starck, recalls a comment he made while serving as a design consultant with one of my former employers. Starck said “the best design is no design.” Quite possibly an apt summary of this design direction.

This cool, minimal aesthetic is not limited to handheld products. The gold winning Microsoft Surface Studio and the bronze winning HP Envy 34 all-in-one desktop computers are both benchmarks for a scaled-up iteration of “cool.” Each PC maintains a serious presence on the desktop with crisp-edged, no nonsense geometry—dominated by a massive sheet of glass supported by a minimalist, nearly invisible frame.

These floating plates of glass—and in the case of the HP Envy, a curved piece of glass—connect to diminutive bases housing the PC components through polished and brushed metal support stalks. Much like their smaller handheld computer brethren—the smartphone—the computing components of these desktop PCs are housed in a slender, rectangular mass. Void of surface details, these units benefit from the elimination of media drives, memory card slots and other visually disruptive protrusions. As with most consumer tech products today, physical controls have been minimized, if not eliminated entirely. Like all of these cool-aesthetic products, all cover gaps reflect a level of precision rarely found beyond high-end wrist watches.

Consumer technology accessories, those supportive technologies and products that enable much of the core functionality of the tech products we primarily interact with, have embraced the look of cool as well. Ranging from the familiar—portable power products like the Belkin Valet Charger, a silver IDEA winner—to newly emerging technologies such as the bronze winning Plume—the minimalist geometric look rendered in metal and metal finishes has become the preferred category aesthetic.

Plume, an adaptive Wi-Fi system consisting of multiple pods designed to plug into wall outlets around the home, creates a wireless mesh network. Given their function as a network of transmitters operating quietly in the background of a wireless broadband network, it’s not obvious how to communicate their function visually. Plume rendered pods as jewel-like, 3D hexagonal shaped inert metallic objects, mysterious in appearance when viewed on a standard wall outlet.

Take a deeper look at this cool aesthetic, as well as the entire IDEA field of winners, in the IDEA Gallery online.

Subscribe to appliance DESIGN

Recent Articles by Lou Lenzi

Design Thinking: What's the Problem?

It Helps to be Smart: the 2018 IDSA Design Excellence Awards for Home Products

The IDSA 2018 International Design Conference: Only the name remains the same

Social Design: From Universal Design to Eldercare Services

Connecting Design to IoT Business Innovation

Lou Lenzi retired as Design Director at GE Appliances last July. He is a member of the Academy of Fellows of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and is Professor of Practice in the Department of Human-Centered Computing at IU’s School of Informatics and Computing.

Related Articles

The IDSA 2018 International Design Conference: Only the name remains the same

Innovating the Process of Innovation

Mass-Market Adoption of the Smart Home: Are We There Yet?

It Helps to be Smart: the 2018 IDSA Design Excellence Awards for Home Products

You must login or register in order to post a comment.

Report Abusive Comment

Subscribe For Free!
  • Print Edition Subscriptions
  • Digital Edition Subscriptions
  • eNewsletters
  • Online Registration
  • Subscription Customer Service

More Videos

Popular Stories

Smart oven

Unlocking the IoT Potential in Smart Appliances

Perlick Collection

Appliance Interfaces Evolve to Resemble Smart Phones and Tablets

Haptics touchscreen

Integrating Haptic Feedback into Design

Haier

Covestro, Haier Plan Digitalization Joint Laboratory

ADNewsWire

Emerson Survey Shows Importance of HVAC in Home Comfort, Worker Productivity and Retail Sales

eNews_360


Events

January 1, 2030

Webinar Sponsorship Information

For webinar sponsorship information, visit www.bnpevents.com/webinars or email webinars@bnpmedia.com.

View All Submit An Event

Poll

Topics to Talk About

What topics would you like to see appliance DESIGN cover more?
View Results Poll Archive

Products

The Innovation Solution: Making Innovation More Pervasive, Predictable and Profitable

The Innovation Solution: Making Innovation More Pervasive, Predictable and Profitable

While others talk about the known innovation problem, The Innovation Solution offers a well researched, logical and holistic understanding of the innovation process, taught for many years at several colleges and Universities.

See More Products

BuyersGuide_360

Appliance Design

appliance DESIGN February 2019

2019 February

Check out the February 2019 edition of appliance DESIGN: The Internet of Things, displays & interfaces, haptics, plastics, and much more!
View More Subscribe
  • Resources
    • Reprints
    • Manufacturing Group
    • Polls
    • Privacy Policy
    • Survey and Sample
  • Want More
    • Connect

Copyright ©2019. All Rights Reserved BNP Media.

Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing