Category Archives: Good Design

Eco Design, Good Design, materials, Product Design

The plastic bags battle

It is already 10 years since I first saw recycled and reusable bags in a supermarket. You buy them for a reasonable price (say, up to 0.50 €), you can use them for a long time and when they break you can exchange them for a new one with no additional cost. A good deal, I would say. But it is 10 years now and we still have an awful lot of plastic bags choking our environment.

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Picture from Arbel Egger

One of the reasons is that many shops still offer the “normal” one-use bags for free parallel to the recycled ones, so many people save the penny. Many of the customers that do care and buy the recycled bag regularly forget to bring it to the shop, and when they have a collection of 10 recycled bags at home they just don’t care anymore and take the ones that are for free.

Many shops don’t even have the alternative and provide only one-use bags. In fact, my experience shows that in small stores a little conflict takes place when I try to explain to the person behind the counter that I don’t need a bag.

Some people have been thinking about this and have taken action to fight the plastic bag problem:

Compostable plastic bags

You have probably heard about these already but they are now spreading fast in the market. Spain is the first plastic bag producer in Europe and it will forbid non biodegradable plastic bags by 2010, so the whole industry is rushing to adapt to the new situation.

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Aldi compostable bag. Picture from BASF

Aldi Süd, a German Supermarket offers now reusable compostable plastic bags. Alternative to these they offer recycled plastic bags, which cost a quarter of the compostable ones. Still, it is a start. Interesting about this bag in particular is the material it is composed of. “Ecovio” is a blend between a biopolymer made of corn starch and a polymer made petrol. The petrol polymer fraction has been processed so that it is in fact compostable. Petrol made biodegradable, not bad, uh?

Tassenbol

This is my favourite aproach so far to tacle the problem. I first saw it in a supermarket in Amsterdam and found it fabulous. It is just a bowl where customers put the bags they don’t need anymore and where they take them when they need some. Simple, effective.

tassenbol_bagglobesome fictitious examples of tassenbol possibilities. Picture from Tassenbol

The only real drawback I found is, that corporate image issues could interfere with the concept. Including a tassenbol in a shop implies promoting that customers leave the shop wearing any brand in their bags, including those of the competition. After researching a little bit I surprisingly found out that many supermarkets in the Netherlands have already the tassenbol in their subsidiaries, so they must have found enough advantages in it to compensate. Lets hope shops in the rest of the world join!

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Buttons, DVA, Good Design, Mobile, Product Design, Usability, User Experience

Telephone design for elderly people

Designing for the elderly could be considered as a hard task. Designers are usually not elderly and knowing how a product would be perceived could be considered a not so easy task. But the results of such a task could be highly rewarding as they directly impact on somebody’s life quality. Even more, usually designing for the elderly means designing for everyone. I show here some products designed keeping in mind the needs of the elderly.

Elderly person talking on the phone

Telephones are always a problem

Elderly people seem to be perfect victims for most home telephones and cellphones. They are difficult to use and they offer a lot of functions that many don’t understand how to find. But telephones are devices with a lot of importance to people, specially during emergencies.

Some companies have been designing telephones for the elderly, for example Doro. Big buttons and limited functions make the following phone a hit for those looking for simplicity. I find the possibility of writing the names on the same phone a great improvement for the older ones.

Doro phone for the elderly.

Digital menus

Navigating through menus on a tiny screen is a problem for a lot of people. Many get lost and don’t understand how to select, scroll or go back to the beginning. Interaction designers at Emporia, like at Doro, have been having this in mind and add a memory help notebook directly on the phone. Note that the notebook is all the time facing the user (and not in the back of the headset like in many home phones).

Emporia Time phone for the elderly

Functionality over style?

Designs for the elderly tend to be ugly: huge buttons, huge letters on a huge screen and terrible colors. But designing for the elderly is designing for all and if the designer is able to produce something appealing to everybody the product could be probably sold to a larger number of people.

The Deutsche Telekom released a home telephone that was initially thought to target the elderly. Not surprisingly a lot of young families are buying the phone. It has big numbers but they still look nice, it has fast dialing buttons and a paper notebook on the charging base.

Again, less digital menus

Something that people are requesting is to have more physical buttons. The Deutsche Telekom placed the answering machine controls on the charging station to make the listening of new messages easier.

Sinus A210 phone designed for the elderly and everybody. Picture be Deutsche Telekom.

That need for adding features

This telephone is including a flashlight and a radio, each function with its own button. Design research might have been revealed that those are important features for elderly people. But they also seem to be there just because it was possible to add something else. A dedicated button for a radio, do we really need that on a cell phone? Is that going to improve the user experience?

Doro phone with radio. Picture by Doro.

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Customization, Good Design, Privacy Policy

Why to think about localization during the design process?

Now a days it seems that products have to be sold worldwide to be considered successful. Every product, a camera, a TV or a website, that aspires to become usable in different countries have to be carefully designed. Buttons, icons and colors should be either worldwide recognizable or adapted to the local market.

 

Design for the public space

City sign design seems to be a very localized field, traveling around I discovered that signs vary from country to country and often from city to city. I have an example of how a concept or sign could be differently interpreted.

Traveling in Argentina I saw the following sign… 

 

Plaza Square sign in Buenos Aires

 In Buenos Aires all "plazas" (squares) have trees, in Europe they don’t. Picture by Tacuar.

 

Public space sign designs in Buenos Aires (Argentina) are, in my opinion, pretty well done. The sign used to indicate the name of a plaza is not an exception but it is very localized. It’s clear for Argentineans that plazas have always trees and that’s why this sign works so good there. 

 

A typical plaza in Buenos Aires. Picture by Sapiamia.

 

In Europe the plaza sign from Buenos Aires might not always be understood. In the old continent most plazas don’t have trees. 

 

A typical plaza in Villadolid, Spain

A typical European plaza, without trees. Picture by Angeldp.

 

Why this example?

This is to show why localization of designs are important. This example is about a design in the public space but it could be applied to software, web and product design. If you want to sell your product oversees you should take care of the meaning sign, symbols, icons and colors could have there; a good designer should think about localization and what signs or icons could potentially mean in another culture.

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