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A friend of mine sent me the following interesting article on an effort to take a more scientific/analytical approach to the design and fabrication of wood baseball bats. Weirdly enough, one of the strangest elements of this article for me wasn’t the attempt to bring science and technology to bear on this problem. I actually think that’s inevitable. Rather it was the contention in this article that bats should be struck on the flat-grain instead of the end grain. WHAT??? When I was a kid we would regularly taunt kids who hit a bat held this way. Everyone knew that the bat would most likely shatter killing everyone within miles. Is nothing sacred? But I digress. Back to the wooden bat versus technology smack-down.
In general I find this sort of thing really fascinating – it speaks to the uneasy intersection that occasionally occurs between long-held traditions and emerging technical understanding. And it’s another example when technology is only one of many considerations in the specification of a product.
These intersections can really grate on the engineers. In the instance of Baseball’s major leagues alone – as those of you who are fans know – there is the delicious bedevilment that the bats must be made of wood. It’s a decision made with almost complete deference to the aesthetics, and tradition of the game (not withstanding some concern that composite bats used at the lower levels would actually be dangerous in the hands of free swinging MLBers). In a head-to-head comparison including ease of manufacture, durability, performance, cost and general safety wood would lose (say that three times quick).
Given their choice and absent rules and tradition to the contrary I suspect few if any few modern day engineers would elect to use wood in this application- a notoriously quirky and fundamentally unpredictable material.
In point of fact, with a few exceptions engineers have generally been successful in eradicating wood from most non-building related designs (tennis rackets, car bodies, golf clubs, airplanes – even pencils are increasingly hedging towards composites). It’s not that wood is necessarily a BAD material. Quite the converse – wood’s strength to weight ratio is superb and when cost is factored in you often can’t beat wood. It’s fairly plentiful – if responsibly managed it’s fully sustainable and wood offers a plethora of ancillary technical benefits. Oh by the way – in general wood can be beautiful as well. The problem – from an engineer’s point of view – is that wood is not particularly repeatable, predicable or homogenous. A fancy way for saying that the way in which wood performs under stress depends on a whole bunch of factors not always easy to understand or anticipate. And engineers tend to really hate unpredictability.
Of course wood has a host of other aesthetic and evocative benefits – as any of you who’ve ever heard the sound a baseball makes off an aluminum bat can attest. And in my opinion, in the right application, these should weigh as importantly as the purely technical considerations. I offer up wooden boats, roller coasters and even the MLB baseball bat as products where I’m happy to let tradition trump technology. I guess it just gives the engineers a slightly different canvas to paint on. Game on.
This isn’t a very designerly post but I wanted to take a second comment on the sad passing of Manute Bol.
For those of you who are not familiar with semi-obscure former NBA athletes, Manute Bol was a freakishly tall Sudanese-born basketball player who played for a laundry list of NBA teams in the Mid ’80s. I love basketball and I’ve always had an affinity for Manute. At 6’4″ I’m sort of tall compared to many people. At 7’7″ Manute was in another zip code. He was coincidentally born a few weeks after me and I found myself watching his basketball career blossom as my own rec-league level game was fading to an inglorious close.
Manute Bol careened dramatically and unexpectedly onto the US basketball scene with more of a sense of bemusement than fanfair. It would be easy to characterize his career as a freak show / circus-like curiosity and many did. He was clearly not of our culture. Manute Bol loved to relay the story of how he once killed a lion with a spear while working as a cowhearder. Probably not going to hear that one from Lebron or Kobe. I’m just guessing.
Initially his complete lack of English combined with his skeletal frame, terrible scoring ability and incredible cultural differences made him the butt of jokes. Later the US warmed to him and at the end of his career he was a fan favorite. At one point the Bullets (Wizards now) paired him with 5’3″ Muggys Bogues making them the tallest and shortest players on the court. He was, by all accounts, a gentle giant – a quick wit and sly prankster.
His NBA career spanned 10 years and his numbers – aside from his shot blocking – were wholly unspectacular. 2.6 PPG, 4.2 rebounds. 19 minutes per game.
What made Manute truly special, however happened outside of the 94′ fantasy world we call a basketball court. Manute is reported to have spent virtually every penny he ever made on charitable causes related to his war-torn homeland. He tirelessly campaigned for human rights and peace in the Sudan trying to bring some stability to this sad place. He would do anything, anywhere at any time to raise money or awareness… he boxed William the Refrigerator Perry in exchange for an agreement from Fox to broadcast the telephone number to charity he established for refuges. Even though he couldn’t skate, he signed a one-day contract to play Hockey to raise money for Children of the Sudan.
He was a man that reached across a huge cultural divide into my heart and made me value the common threads of humanity that bind us all. I’ve often wondered if I found myself in his size 16 shoes – lifted from a place of tremendous poverty, strife and tragedy – and given unimaginable riches in new world playing a game I love – if I would never look back. Yet Manute Bol is a man who never looked forward. Never forgot and never gave up. For this I deeply admire him.
Manute Bol passed away last week at the age of 47 from a disease he most likely contracted while on a humanitarian mission in Africa. Basketball may have given Manute Bol to us – but Manute gave us so much more. The world has lost a fine human being and I am saddened.
It has been gut-wrenching watching the BP oil spill tragedy unfold in the gulf and my heart goes out to the residents of this area who are facing the prospect of their lives and livelihood being forever changed.
From a purely technical perspective I’ve tried my best to reserve judgment and dispassionately ponder the appropriate allocation of fate and blame. Clearly there are some disturbing revelations and allegations concerning corner cutting and risk taking. At the same time, I fully understand deep water undersea drilling is undoubtedly an incredibly complex undertaking which exists in some part to support our societies’ lifestyle – not to mention the jobs of countless workers in the chain leading from the gulf sea floor directly to my car’s gas cap.
I am reminded of Henry Petroki’s brilliant book - “to engineer is human”. In it, Petroski – a civil engineer by training – speaks of the roll of failure in successful design and eloquently reminds us that all technical human progress involves risk. And while risk begets failure – often spectacularly or tragically – these failures provide a unique opportunity to advance our understanding, knowledge, and practice in a way not easily duplicated through success.
Through all of recorded history – and undoubtedly before, there have been a litany of terrible tragedies – the Tacoma Narrows Bridge , the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the space Shuttle Endeavor, the sinking of the Valdez, Hurricane Katrina, Hyatt Regency Tragedy and now sadly the BP gulf spill.
Predictably, and perhaps appropriately, certain individuals will rise up to offer castigation, place blame and seek retribution. Conversely – there are others that will claim fate, misfortune, inevitability or just plain bad luck provide allowances and shrug these occurrences off as “just one of those things”.
Meanwhile, time has shown that though each of these tragedies, yet a third group of individuals will thoughtfully seek deep understanding through careful study, analysis, reflection and use this understanding to refine designs, policies and regulations. Ultimately I believe it is this response – far more than denial, excuses or witch hunts and political posturing – that leads to true benefit and progress.
The Tacoma Narrows gave us safer bridges. The Titanic gave us lifeboat regulations, the Valdez gave us double-hulled tankers and the oil spill prevention act, Katrina may rebuild the levies. It’s possible the BP Gulf tragedy – as painful as it is – will undoubtedly give us safer undersea drilling and may yet be a catalyst to a more sustainable energy policy based on renewable and environmentally responsible technologies.
One of our designers circulated the following link to some wonderful and inspiring package design work: cool designs.
I have to admit there are some dramatic packages and some really cool, stunning and thoughtful work.
I am not a packaging expert by any means but I did want to share one interesting personal experience I have had. As many of you know I am co-founder of a start-up consumer products company which has introduced a new product to the marketplace: FlameDisk.
When it came time to do the packaging the founders told ourselves we wanted to do something very fresh, clean and artistic. We had some early packaging concepts done by an individual with lots of consumer package design experience and they all looked boring, bland and not very ‘designed’. We were frustrated at their inability to create something that… well frankly something that looked like the packages in the link above. So we re-vamped the project and turned to a different design agency and gave them the instructions that we wanted something bold, sexy, clean, simple and highly designed.
You can argue about whether they hit the mark but I think they gave us just what we wanted and we were all pretty pleased and excited about the work. To us it looked very different than the ordinary products we saw in the relevant store aisles.
So what happened? Basically this package totally failed in the market. It may have been clean and sexy but people simply did not “get” the product or what it did!
Whether or not the package was succeeding as a design was academic because the package was failing in its most basic and important task – get the consumer to buy the product!!!
In retrospect we probably made the mistake of over-valuing the graphic design and under-valuing the “information design” aspect of the package – how important communicating our product’s function and unique attributes were.
It took a lot of money and time but we revamped our package to something a LOT less sexy, exotic and designerly…
When we switched to this package the impact and results on sales were dramatic.
What I failed to fully comprehend is that our package was not entering a design contest – it was trying to sell our product. Any package needs to work very hard at doing this and frankly the attributes that effectively cause someone to REALLY chose your product are often very very different than the attributes that cause us to say “that’s a stunning package design”. I’m sure there are some product categories or products where an intriguing and compelling graphic design can compel someone to pick up the product and learn more but most consumer outlets are visually crowded, chaotic arenas and what looks clean, fresh and intriguing by itself often disappears into being just another set of colors or an odd shape on the shelf.
I learned the hard way that the super-market shelf is the most brutal marketplace in the world. You are toe-to-toe with your competitors and your consumers sometimes have a fraction of a second to say “I get it” and buy your product or move on to something else.
I think that’s why so many companies have what many of us would call “boring” packaging. It may be boring but it’s entirely possible that it is much more effective at its actual job than some packaging we consider fresh and exciting.
I don’t want to claim I’ve cracked the code or fully understand this but it was a brutal, real life lesson and one I hope to not forget.
I don’t mean to downplay the power of design but I look at a lot of the packages presented in the link above and wonder how successful they would REALLY be in moving product off shelves. Many of you may be designers but I would ask you to put yourself in the position of a ‘typical’ consumer in a store. You’re tired, sick of shopping and want to get home. You have a FRACTION of a second to make a snap decision. Which package would you REALLY pick up??? Really????
I would argue that our true reaction to consumer product packaging in the retail environment is so subliminal as to almost defy characterization. It is CLEARLY very very different than the way we react to a product package as a visual element or design exercise.
Most of us never stop to fully think about it but some of the subtle things that make the Glad package appear “boring” are actually probably really effective in actually moving the product.
For starters, Glad has a huge and unfair advantage of a recognizable brand name. Aside from that, in a “fraction of a second” I know that this size bag fits in my large trash can (the picture is my clue) – there are 28 bags in this box and it has two drawstrings (easy to close and drag to the curb) and has three plies.
Which bag would you REALLY pick up if you’re tired of shopping and want to get home?
I’m not going to argue against design but I will argue that all design serves a higher purpose that must be fully comprehended by the designer. I personally feel that design for design’s sake is an oxymoron
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