El Gaffney

Design Based On Insight

As I sit on my couch multi-tasking (watching World Series of Poker, writing a brief, eating dinner, and making my way through my feeds), something clicks (pun intended). My coffee table is pretty bare (with feng shui in mind but mostly for aesthetic purpose). I’ve got a candle and a couple books and magazines that make me look interesting and well-rounded. Oh yeah, and my Time Warner Cable remote. Necessary ugly. (“Uglies” for the many people who don’t have the universal remote and are still working with one TV remote for the power ON and OFF, one for the channels, a remote for the stereo, another for the DVD player, and who knows what else.) Necessary ugly – or so I thought.

I came across this link from Russell Davies’ delicious feeds. The choose to use design to solve the problem of remotes getting lost. So they made a remote that’s really fragile, so you won’t toss it around/you’ll take better care of it and thus not lose it. The brief could easily have been: Remotes ruin the living room look.

It reminds me of Method’s insight into cleaning: People squeeze cleaning in between doing other things, so having to go into cabinets and search for cleaning products wastes time and is a part of the annoying process. So they designed their soaps, etc. to look nice so that people would keep them on their kitchen counters/out next to their sinks. Just a reminder of how design is a powerful tool for building insight in products.

Tags: design, home, planning, remote