Posts tagged Object Culture

Russell Flinchum with Vim Da Pug (American Kennel Club name: Janis’s Dagobert Vim)

Raleigh is a Smooth Coat Fox Terrier interested in the influence of dogs on Industrial Design. When she is not busy looking for a fox to hunt, she helps her owner with her blog. This month, Raleigh met up with Pug-owner Russell Flinchum, design historian, teacher, curator and author of “Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit.”

We’re in Russell Flinchum’s kitchen where he’s meticulously attending to what he calls, “the Pug routine,” a process of feeding his 13 year old dog, Vim Da Pug. As Vim hops around the trash can anxiously, Flinchum peels a hardboiled egg, discards the yolk, and plops the whites in the food dish. Next are the steamed broccoli and steamed chicken breast. Flinchum then becomes distracted—on the counter by the bowl rests a new acquisition for the Industrial Design historian, an original Osterizer blender that he dates to 1946. He thinks it is the “Beehive” model, a copy of Oster’s 1937 Waring “Blendor,” endorsed by band leader Fred Waring himself. He flicks a switch to show off the powerful whirr of the motor, sending Vim into paroxysm of fury over the neglected food preparations. As the motor quiets, Flinchum tops off the food dish with a scoop of Eukanuba Reduced Fat Senior Formula Dry Food. It’s the bag that comes with a Pug on the front; the stocky breed makes a great advertisement for the dog on a diet.

Flinchum favors design classics like this Osterizer blender

As Vim eats, we settle on the couch to discuss the topic at hand—dogs and industrial design. It’s no accident that the beige couch matches Vim’s fur; Flinchum’s waging a never-ending war with shedding. There are a million and one products made to remove pet fur, but Flinchum, design junkie though he is, isn’t interested. “Sticky tape,” he says, “works just fine.” Fair enough.

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One of the dumbest things I ever did was build this mobile workbench a few years ago out of leftover 2×4s. I built it in my apartment, intending to use it in my studio. My apartment front door is 36 inches wide and I wanted the bench to be as big as possible, so I built it to be precisely 35.5 inches wide. When I tried to wheel it out the door…it didn’t fit. I’d forgotten to allow for the thickness of the door that protrudes into the doorway when it’s wide open, which is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 inches.

That extra inch or two may not be a big deal to most people (and most competent handymen), but if you’re in a wheelchair, you want every inch of extra doorway width you can get, to avoid scraping knuckles. That’s why healthcare manufacturer Duro-Med Industries makes this clever Expandable Door Hinge:

It doesn’t actively expand, but the hinge is shaped with two extra bends so you get full clearance with the door open. It’s sold by the Institute for Human Centered Design (formerly known as Adaptive Environments), a 30-year-old Boston-based nonprofit “committed to advancing the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages and abilities.” You can check out their online store here.

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Something I find endlessly fascinating is interface designs that didn’t make the cut, the misfires and experiments created while designers floundered around looking for solutions acceptable for mass uptake. For example, the established QWERTY keyboard that we all know, like this one here,

more or less “tracks” with the keyboard on even this ancient typewriter:

But when you head over to Martin Howard’s Antique Typewriters, the largest collection of these machines frm the 1880s and 1890s in Canada, you start to see the equivalent of 19th-century interface design shots-in-the-dark.

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We’re digging the National Design Collective, a trio of Toronto-based recent ID grads (Scott Bodaly, Heather Lam and Jessica Tien) that get together after work, use ID skills to make fun stuff just for the sake of learning and experimentation, and document it all.

Example #1: They wanted to learn about lost-wax casting, and the result was a series of experimental jewelry and a cool silver map of Winnipeg pinned to a bag made from industrial felt.

Example #2: To hold baked goods up off of a countertop while it cools, you could make a simple trivet out of wire–but why not make a mold and cast one out of concrete?

A few items that we learned and want to share with you from the process:

1. Concrete in the eye is a bad thing.
["..the googles! They do nothing!" - Rainer Wolfcastle]
2. Make sure your mould will not leak before casting.
[As concrete sets, water is expelled out and in our case, all over the worktable.]
3. Don’t wash your concrete bucket in the laundry sink afterward.
4. Know how to use a plumbing snake if you did not follow #3.

They also do commercial stuff, like this stackable, easily-reconfigurable window display for Idea Couture.

But most of all, we love NDC because they turned us on to Animals with Lightsabers.

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During my mother’s childhood in her country of origin, a neighbor might swing by your house and deliver a plate full of chow, delicacies or baked goods. Local custom was that when you returned the plate to them a few days later, you never gave it back empty, but loaded it with the fruits of your own kitchen labors.

When I was a waiter my boss used to dress me down if he caught me traveling empty-handed between the ground floor and the storeroom in the basement. He had grown up in a four-storey Brooklyn brownstone, he explained, and his mother would admonish him if he traveled between floors without carrying anything. “There’s always something that needs to be brought up or down,” she’d say.

These lessons are universal, and no one knows them better than logistics coordinators for shipping companies. If a container crosses the Pacific loaded with Toyotas and goes back empty, that’s a huge waste of fuel. But despite their best efforts, it happens all the time. And even if they weigh different amounts, 1,000 empty containers take up the same amount of space as 1,000 full containers, meaning the ships are forced to make the same amount of trips each way.

That will change if Dutch entrepreneur René Giesbers’ Cargoshell folding shipping container concept makes it into production. When empty, the Cargoshell can be folded flat, taking up only 25% of its original volume. Ships can carry four times as many empty containers as full. And the Cargoshell is made from composites rather than steel, which give off far less CO2 during the production process.

A video of the prototype is below. Non-Dutch-speakers will not be able to follow what they’re talking about, but you can fast forward to 1:20 to see the ten seconds where they unfold the thing.

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Anyone who’s ever moved house knows you’ve got to put everything in boxes, which is why U-Haul sells them.

Shipping companies figured this out as early as the 1700s; prior to that you had the “break bulk” cargo system, which meant scores of dockworkers going up and down gangplanks with bolts of fabric and sacks and whatnot across their shoulders. But the boxes and crates loaded onto ships (and later trains) differed in size, shape and composition depending on where they came from. Through the 1800s, some were made of wood, others of iron.

In the 20th century, organizations ranging from British railroad consortiums to the U.S. Army all made efforts to standardize their own shipping boxes, but it wasn’t until 1956 that an innovation appeared which has taken root around the globe and is still with us today: The invention of the shipping container.

American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean came up with what’s called “intermodal” shipping containers, that is to say, a box that could be loaded on a ship, train or truck. The cost savings was staggering and sounded the death knell for longshoremen: What once cost $5.86 per ton to load now cost only 16 cents.

Coming up with a standard-sized box might not sound like a big deal, but the intermodal concept was an early success in systems design, something like what Apple does with iPods, iTunes and iMacs. Much of the things in our homes, including the computer I’m typing this on, the monitor you’re reading it from, and the chairs we’re both sitting in, spent time in McLean’s boxes.

(Side note: Entrepreneur McLean, who only had a high school education and starting off pumping gas but later amassed a fortune of $400 million, has a fascinating life story loaded with business lessons too convoluted to encapsulate here–take a look. Said the then-U.S.-Secretary-of-Transportation Norman Mineta upon Mclean’s death, “A true giant, Malcom revolutionized the maritime industry in the 20th century. His idea for modernizing the loading and unloading of ships, which was previously conducted in much the same way the ancient Phoenicians did 3,000 years ago, has resulted in much safer and less-expensive transport of goods, faster delivery, and better service. We owe so much to a man of vision, ‘the father of containerization,’ Malcom P. McLean.”)

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Wooden ships used to set sail from New York fully laden with American goods to bring to the Old World. If the trade balance was perfect, they would unload their stuff in Europe and sail back to America loaded up with an equal amount of European goods; but since more Europeans wanted American resources than vice versa, that wasn’t the case.

After unloading in Europe, something was needed to load the empty ships up with for ballast for the return journey. At the time cobblestones were the cheapest, densest, most easily mass-produced and most compact units of weight around, and their squarish shapes made them space-efficient and easy to stack. They became the ballast of choice.

I like to imagine that cobblestones then started piling up around New York docks, after thousands of dockworkers got free, mandatory take-home paperweights. (“What the hell am I supposed to do with this? It’s the 1600s and I’ve never touched a piece of paper in my life.”) But most likely some European mentioned to the Americans “Oh by the way, you can make roads out of these bricks. We’ve been doing it since the 15th century.”

The end result is that you can see tons of cobblestone streets in New York, Boston and elsewhere, often close to the water. Cobblestones were holy hell on carriage wheels and they meant horses would have to wear horseshoes, but they had an added technological advantage: In that pre-asphalt and pre-storm-drain era, they allowed water to run between the individual stones, preventing mud build-up and ruts that carts would get stuck in.

Stay tuned for “Shaped by Our Shipping, Part 2: Thinking inside the box.”

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