If you’re into the design of mobile phones, or high-end watches, there’s a good chance you will have read about Ulysse Nardin’s launch of a ‘hybrid’ cell phone recently. Developed in partnership with SCI Innovations, the Chairman is aimed at the luxury end of the market currently inhabited by Vertu and a few smaller industry players. Unlike those manufacturers however, Ulysse Nardin has a huge amount of experience and brand heritage, and is widely respected for it’s ability to combine traditional watchmaking skills with technological advancements (Ulysse Nardin has been granted more patents in mechanical watchmaking than any other manufacturer). This product represents a significant milestone for Ulysse Nardin – not only is it the first digital product they have made, it is also the first time they have partnered with another company. It is also significant for me personally, given that the industrial design of the product was carried out by my consultancy, Matt Sinclair Design.

Ulysse Nardin Chairman in rose gold © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

Although the product has been publicly launched, there are a number of issues which remain confidential. Pricing, availability and delivery schedules are commercially sensitive for example, and a number of features are the subject of ongoing patent application processes. If you are interested to know more about the product your first point of information should be through this contact page. However in this post I will try to give an overview of the design and highlight the most significant aspects. I also intend to incorporate this project into my PhD thesis, and in  later posts I will go into more detail about the design process, and explain why this inclusion is relevant and justified.

Rotor detail © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

Without doubt one of the most striking elements of the design, and the one which has attracted most attention, is the rotor on the back of the phone. This feature has been a requirement from the very first briefing document, and to a certain extent has driven the design of the whole product. Such rotors, which automatically wind a spring to power a watch, are a visible feature of all Ulysse Nardin watches. By requiring such an intricate and highly engineered component to be incorporated into the phone – a component which so clearly alludes to the brand’s heritage – a benchmark for the design and quality of the whole product was clearly set. The design and construction of the phone, whether viewed as a whole or by looking at individual features, had to meet the same exacting standards that Ulysse Nardin apply to all their products.

Reverse view of the rose gold version © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

The inclusion of the rotor, which was specially designed to charge a supplementary battery rather than wind a watch spring, also highlights another key philosophy behind the design and specification of the phone. In today’s mobile phone market, the ‘top end’ is almost exclusively involved in a race to add technological complexity. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it often takes place with little thought as to the actual benefits to the customer. A product which has been bought because it is at the cutting edge also dates quickly, as soon as a slightly better model is launched in fact. Rather than try to compete in this race, the Chairman phone innovates in an entirely new way. In this respect it is similar to Ulysse Nardin watches such as the Perpetual Calendars – the only mechanical watches to allow simultaneously synchronised adjustments of the minutes, hours, day and year indicators. Being the first mobile phone manufacturer to add a mechanical charging device not only indicates a new approach to thinking about the design of such products, it also creates a striking feature around which subsequent phones, and an underlying brand language, can be based.

Ulysse Nardin GMT ± Perpetual © Ulysse Nardin

In the early conceptual phase of the design, it soon became clear that, for a number of reasons, the best way to think about the mechanical construction of the phone was likely to be by designing a modular product. This was not a particularly ingenious insight: a modular approach lends itself to smaller production runs because the gains achieved by integrated approaches are typically only realised with the economies of scale offered by mass manufacturing techniques. However a modular construction would offer much more than just a default way to progress. Firstly, a further key criteria for the design was that the product should be customisable, as this would allow for product variants and limited editions – an important tool in the luxury goods market. Modularity allows parts to be interchanged, for example a gold cover on one variant can be replaced by a steel cover on another. Furthermore, such modularity allows customisation decisions to be made later, meaning they can be more responsive to customer requests, since they are not dependent on tooling schedules or economics. And finally, modularity enables another important aspect of the experience of owning the product – the offer of a guarantee to repair the phone, no matter how it is damaged. By utilising a modular construction, the Chairman can be disassembled and parts repaired or replaced, in a way that is generally impossible, or simply uneconomic, with conventionally manufactured products.

Limited Edition in carbon fibre and steel, based on the Ulysse Nardin Diver Perpetual © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

A mobile phone is in many ways a very different product to a watch, even if both have been designed as luxury items – it uses digital rather than mechanical technologies, it belongs to a relatively immature industry rather than one which has evolved over centuries, it is perceived as a tool of everyday use rather than an item to be brought out only on special occasions etc. Nonetheless, it was important to come up with a design and develop a design language which would complement Ulysse Nardin’s existing products, without creating a pastiche of styling cues. To help achieve this I analysed a significant number of Ulysse Nardin watches, grouping them into categories of my own making, and noting the similarities and differences. One particular insight which informed all the concepting work was that, compared to other brands, Ulysse Nardin watches appear less ‘severe’ and less ‘machined’. They are often more detailed and decorated than the plain, stark surfaces of competitors. Edges are more rounded, and metal surfaces are generally more polished (ie glossy). My impression was that although these are undoubtedly ‘masculine’ products, they are not being purchased by customers who feel the need to assert their masculinity.

Ulysse Nardin Chairman in rose gold and steel © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

As well as arriving at some broad guidelines which would help direct the design of the product, a list of features and details was also collated which would help the phone sit more comfortably within the Ulysse Nardin design language. The intention here was not necessarily to incorporate all these details into the design, but rather to gain a sensitivity to some of the clues which would identify a particular design as a Ulysse Nardin product:

Individually numbered products.
Visible screws on the rear.
Discrete (ie individual) buttons rather than grouped buttons. This implies smaller buttons with space around, rather than larger buttons whose edges touch.
Buttons should be prominent from the surface of the product, rather than flush with the surface.
Micro textures and patterns under the glass. Could also be replicated on the rear of the product.
Place emphasis on the thickness of the product, rather than the width or length.
Analogue dials to display information such as date or timezone
Colours: silver, gold, black, Ulysse Nardin blue. Red for emphasis.
Possible materials: gold, rose gold, stainless steel, platinum, titanium, rhodium, palladium, carbon fibre, zirconium dioxide (or similar ceramic), sapphire crystal, leather…

Ulysse Nardin Chairman in rose gold © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

In all, this project has been a fantastic experience for me. It has given me the opportunity to work with materials and production techniques which previous, mainstream consumer electronics projects have not allowed, and it has taught me  a huge amount about the expectation of quality which the watchmaking industry accepts without question. Of course, I can’t consider my work done until products are in the hands of customers, and even then I expect to be receiving feedback which could inform the design of subsequent products. But right now, it’s extremely satisfying to know how well the Chairman has been received by both client and customers, and simply to be able to tell people about something I’ve been itching to show but have had to keep secret.

So far I have looked at ways in which rapid manufacturing technologies might become available to consumers, and the reasons why product design for rapid manufacturing is easier than for mass manufacturing. In the final part of this extended post I want to address the only other remaining hurdle to consumers designing and manufacturing their own products: the tools they will use to design with.

Consumer co-design, sometimes called co-creation, is a topic that’s been written about at length by design researchers. At it’s purest it involves the end user, or typical representatives of end users, entering the design process and creating products or services as part of a design team. In practice though, co-design is often little more than an enhanced customer research exercise. End users might be asked about their needs and desires, encouraged to offer suggestions, and even invited to critique proposed solutions. But there is no doubt it is the designers who are expert, and who make the final decision.

As a designer myself, I confess I find it difficult to break free of this mindset – surely my training and experience mean I am able to understand what a market of consumers will want better than an individual consumer themself might? But the point is, what I think will end up being irrelevant if consumers are able to design their own products. Why should a consumer care that I think their product is crass or crude, if it’s exactly what they want, and they’ve made it? At the moment though, I have one trick up my sleeve – I can use CAD, to design a product and to communicate that design to the means of production, in a way that no non-designer can. All the time designers and design engineers can monopolise the expertise needed to create CAD data, consumer created products will not happen.

Autodesk AliasStudio, image from Diseno-art.com

Typically CAD software requires a substantial investment in time in order to gain even a basic expertise. With the first professional CAD package I learned, I-Deas (since bought out by Siemens and renamed NX), I reckon it took three years before I felt I was driving the CAD, rather than the CAD influencing the kind of designs I created. Writing about this in ‘Fab’, Neil Gershenfeld notes that “there’s been no compelling reason to make engineering software easy to use; these programs have been written by engineers, for engineers, who make a career out of using one of them.” There’s a reason for the complexity of course, designing and engineering a high technology product is a complex task, and the design of a passenger aircraft was no easier for the average person to understand before CAD software was invented. Nonetheless it’s true that for non-experts, just looking at the UI of a CAD software package such as AliasStudio is intimidating, with its seemingly endless icons and drop down menus.

Whenever reading about CAD software aimed at consumers (whether in theory or actual software products), the word I always come across is ‘intuitive’. The assumption is that anyone not trained in CAD requires software which is easy to use. To my mind this doesn’t really have any value though – saying you want software which is intuitive is like saying you want a car that looks nice. Who is ever going to ask for the alternative: “I want a car that looks rubbish” or “I want software which is difficult to understand.” In any case, intuition doesn’t necessarily mean ‘immediately understandable’, intuition also comes with practice and familiarity. What’s really being asked for is a reduction in complexity.

Cosmic Blobs © Dassault Systemes

Cosmic Blobs, made by Dassault Systemes (who also make Solidworks and Catia) is a perfect illustration of this. When I first tried to use Cosmic Blobs I found it far from intuitive, despite being aimed at children. The lack of drop down menus, no right mouse button clicks and no tool-tips meant I was totally lost as to where to start. Having spoken to a couple of people whose kids have tried Cosmic Blobs, this is also the reaction of computer literate children who are used to a typical Windows interface. But after a few minutes playing around, you start to get the hang of it. Essentially modelling consists of choosing from a few primitives, adding or subtracting them from one another, and pushing or pulling on a surface to deform it. There’s no surfacing commands, no way to analyse curvature continuity, no assembly environment and no finite element analysis. The software becomes usable to a novice because the choice of commands is so limited. Cosmic Blobs isn’t simple because you intuitively understand how it works, it’s simple because it doesn’t take long to find out what everything does.

SketchUp © Google

Of course, the downside of reducing the complexity by reducing functionality is that the capabilities of the software are necessarily reduced. This is obvious when considering another consumer oriented CAD package, Google SketchUp. SketchUp can be downloaded and used for free, and was initially envisaged as an architectural modelling package. Increasingly though, it is being used to model furniture and products. SketchUp uses a combination of solids and surfaces, which it calls faces. Faces can only ever be planar, this means that not only is SketchUp functionally easier to master than a typical CAD package, it is also conceptually easier to grasp (understanding G2 – G4 surface continuity is something most designers struggle with at some point). Of course the kinds of products which can be modelled in SketchUp cannot have the sophistication of surfacing as products modelled in Alias, Solidworks, Catia etc. But they can, and are, being modelled by people not trained as designers, who don’t have the time to master professional CAD even if they have the inclination. An ‘unsophisticated’ tool that works (for them) is better than a sophisticated one which does not.

Alternative design concepts produced using Genoform © Genometri

Stripped down alternatives to professional CAD software are not the only possibility however. I have written before about Genoform iterative design software, which works as a plug-in for Solidworks. It’s primarily intended as a tool for designers, to explore design alternatives based on a number of fixed and variable parameters. So in the example shown above, the designer has chosen a certain size of display, and decided that under the display are three buttons, with another input area below those buttons. On the right hand side are a headset jack and some kind of sliding button. The software has then generated a number of designs, and will keep generating designs up to a maximum of 10,000 variants. But it’s possible to imagine a similar system available to consumers rather than designers. The designer would still decide which parameters are fixed and which are changeable, but the consumer would decide how many variants to generate. The requirement is then no longer for a consumer to learn any kind of CAD, but simply to be able to make a decision about which option they like best.

Spore © Electronic Arts Inc.

I’d like to finish this post by talking about Spore, a computer game by Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) which is due out later this year. Games have had a significant influence on the computer industry in the past, pushing the limits of hardware as well as experimenting with input devices and UI’s. With Spore it could be that games also influence the computer aided design process. Without going into the full scope of the game, an important part of Spore is the creature editor, shown above. Players can first set the traits of their creature (strength, speed, carnivorous tendencies etc), and then build the creature from a kit of parts. Not having played the game it’s difficult to know exactly how the editor works, but my understanding from reading about it is that the editor has built in intelligence. So if your creature has two legs, the editor knows they should be right and left, rather than both left; it knows that hands go on the end of arms and eyes go on the head etc. It’s not a big jump to imagine this idea of ‘guided design’ being applied to products, such that consumers are prevented from making bad decisions.

The software examples above work in different ways, and would expect different inputs and levels of expertise from consumers. What they have in common is the implication for industrial designers. It’s my belief, and part of my PhD’s hypothesis, that in future the designer’s role will be to define which parameters of any product are fixed, and limit or control which parameters can be changed by the consumer. I’m sure I will be returning to this subject often in the future

PingMag is a dual-language (japanese-english) online magazine design based in Tokyo. It recently ran an interview I made with Brendan Walker, an ex-aeronautical engineer whose company Aerial specialises in the creation of ‘thrilling experiences’. The published article was changed slightly from the one I submitted, so here it is as originally intended:

Jo riding the Tristar

Do you remember how, as a child, some jobs seemed so cool you couldn’t believe people got paid to do them? Like working in a chocolate factory or as a test driver for Ferrari? I was reminded of that when I first met Brendan Walker, who started his career designing jet fighters but now works with some of the world’s top theme parks, designing future rides I talked to Brendan, who New Scientist dubbed the “Thrill Engineer,” about home-made fireworks, his fascination with aircraft crashes, and the difference between being thrilled and being frightened.

Yes, the home-made fireworks, I think they got me my first job as an apprentice at British Aerospace! Everyone else in the interview was talking about the differences in performance of various aircraft engines, whereas I spent the whole time describing how I built three-stage rockets by taking fireworks apart and rebuilding them. Maybe that should have been a warning, because I wasn’t really suited to doing computational fluid analysis. I got frustrated at how long it took to design a plane, typically it can be 20 years, which is why and left and went to study Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art.

When I applied I had a fairly standard idea of what ID was, but whilst I was studying I was tutored by Tony Dunne, who messed my head up a bit by convincing me that industrial design can be about experiment and performance. So when I left the RCA, although I did some ID work, I was already tending towards art projects, particularly large-scale kinetic and electromechanical sculptures. And I quickly realised that what really interested me was observing how people reacted to the work. I was getting excited by watching other people watching what I had created. At the same time I’d been reading about these guys in Australia whose hobby was climbing the Sydney Harbour bridge illegally, and I started to realise that everyone experiences products in different ways, often in ways the designer never intends or predicts. So my work began to move towards investigating the psychology of how people experience objects.

Was that to do with the genetics of people who are thrill-seekers?

Partly, but that was already a well trodden route. It might be interesting to know that 5% of people have a defect in the D4DR gene which means they have to go to greater extremes to find their thrills, but it doesn’t help you design better products. So rather than take that approach, I began looking at how people created experiences which were thrilling for themselves.

Deathslide at the Airphoria 2 performance

And how did you do that?

Well, basically I gatecrashed online discussion groups where people were talking about thrills. I started by taking random words, adding “thrill” to them, and entering them into Google to find out who was talking about these things. I remember “tennis + thrill” and “cooking + thrill” were two of them. I made about 50 interviews, ranging from one woman who was crotcheting her own wedding dress, to a man who was secretly a transvestite, with all these people talking about what made the experiences thrilling. And amazingly, I found that there were almost always some common features: for example a thrilling experience has to have an element of visceral stimulation, it has to have elements of power and control (whether being in control or out of control), and there is often a sense of being valued, of how you think others perceive you.

So is there an over-riding definition of thrill?

Yes, I think so. I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So obviously there’s an evolutionary driver – we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life things have become confused, we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but actually I believe that we go looking for thrills because that’s when we have the greatest sense of being alive

.

Self portrait in an air disaster

Tell me about the “Walker Thrill Factor”

Okay, well, having made all these interviews I was starting to wonder, what the fuck have I done?! I’m meant to be a designer and I’ve spent the last six moths coming up with a definition of thrill! I had reams and reams of paper of transcripted interviews, but where did I go from there? And then one day I was out running with my dogs and I had a kind of Eureka moment, I realised you could think of thrill the way I’d been taught to think in engineering. What I mean is that components of pleasure and arousal can be defined mathematically in relation to each other. That led to a hypothesis, a formula where thrill is defined in terms of the amount of pleasure and arousal and the rate at which each one changes. And that’s the Walker Thrill Factor.

It’s not actually been proved, but it’s not been disproved either. And it’s become really valuable because now in my work, if I’m designing a rollercoaster for example, I can decide to reduce a person’s arousal whilst keeping their pleasure high, in readiness for the next increase in stimulation. I can talk with other people about why certain elements are placed at certain points in a ride, and we can discuss them from a shared understanding rather than just intuition or gut feeling.

The Walker Thrill Factor was first published in The Taxonomy of Thrill

Okay, so you’d come up with a definition of thrill and an equation to explain it; how did you get people to take you seriously when you didn’t have any actual experience designing rollercoasters?

Around the time I published “The Taxonomy of Thrill” I was also designing some interactive exhibits for the Wellcome Wing at the Science Museum in London, and they picked up on the mathematical element of my work. To be honest I hadn’t intended it to be a rigorous piece of scientific research, it was more like a rule of thumb I could use in designing interesting experiences.

Interactive exhibits at the Wellcome Wing © Science Museum, London

But I suppose everyone has heard of the phrase “thrill factor,” and there was me somewhat naively claiming to know what it was. Because up until then, rollercoasters had been designed with a mixture of intuition and experience to choreograph the ride – how does a barrel roll follow a drop etc – and g-force calculations. That can be done very accurately using computer simulations to calculate changes from positive to negative g, but it only tells you how arousing the ride is, it can’t calculate the pleasure. So the Science Museum was interested to create some experiments where we measured arousal and pleasure, which would validate the hypothesis. That led to the first Thrill Laboratory, which got a lot of press and TV attention.

Miami Trip, Thrill Laboratory 1; Oblivion, Thrill Laboratory 2

At the same time I also approached Tussaud Studios, who designed rides for Alton Towers, and managed to get a meeting with Simon Opie who was the general manager. It was actually really scary, because in “The Taxonomy of Thrill” I had talked about my work in terms of scripting and choreography. Simon Opie was from a theatre background – he had worked on productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company – so if anyone would be able to destroy my ideas it would be him! He gave me a real grilling, but at the end of the meeting he ordered 13 books to give to his creative directors, so I realised I had done okay. That led to a contract with Tussaud Studios where I led a team looking at future attractions, 5 – 10 years in the future. The project went well so I was invited to become a permanent consultant, and when Tussauds were bought out by Merlin to become the world’s second biggest theme park group I became a consultant for all their brands: Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, London Dungeon etc. Within that work I bring a certain viewpoint and expertise, a methodology for understanding how to make their attractions more thrilling. And I’ve also taken that to other companies such as Disneyland Paris, where I’ve done similar work.

Brendan adjusts a rider’s monitoring equipment, Thrill Laboratory 2

So are you actually sitting down drawing, designing rollercoasters then?

These days I am, yes. In the beginning my work was more conceptual, strategic. But recently I’ve been getting jobs where I do have to design or choreograph the ride. I’m not designing what a particular ride might look like, its more like creating storyboards of the way a ride will feel. In fact I was watching some Alfred Hitchcock DVD’s and in the extras features it showed some of the storyboards. They weren’t that well drawn, but really communicated how a scene should progress and how tension and excitement would build or drop off. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.

Storyboard images from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho © Universal

Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, is there a difference between something that’s thrilling and something that’s exciting?

Well in dictionary terms the differences are very subtle. But by my definition, thrill has high levels of both arousal and pleasure, whereas fright has high levels of arousal but low levels of pleasure – in terms of pleasure fright is exactly opposite to thrill. What’s interesting though, is lets say in a horror film, the tension and fright is unpleasurable, but from that low point the pleasure has to increase to get back to “normal.” It’s the release from fright which people find thrilling.

I know that you still continue to do artistic projects. Why are these important when you’re being paid to do commercial projects?

It’s the opportunity for experimentation I suppose. The last performance piece I did, at the Shunt Lounge in London, was part of an ongoing piece called Airphoria, which was inspired by a Korean Air crash in Epping Forest, East London.

Installation, from the Airphoria 1 exhibition

I know there’s no way a theme park is ever going to commission a ride based on an air disaster. But when you call something art the limits change, and the audience is generally much more open to things which would be classified as bad taste if they were pure entertainment. Especially in smaller, contemporary galleries, the audience is already on the fringes of what is commercially acceptable. So in this latest piece I was interested in eye witness accounts of the crash, where people had described seeing a fireball coming down out of the sky and being fascinated and excited by it. Only when they found out it was an airplane crash did they become reluctant to talk about their feelings.

From the Airphoria 1 exhibition

It’s strange though isn’t it, that it’s okay to make a film about an aircrash, which people will go to see for entertainment. But it’s not acceptable to be entertained in other ways.

That’s right, and in Airphoria I’ve been interested in the possibility of recreating a visceral experience, a sense of thrill and euphoria which draws on the event of a plane crash before the feelings of guilt about those feelings emerges. What’s also interesting about the Korea Air crash was that the forest was a nature reserve, and a lot of deer and other animals died, so the next stage of Airphoria is to create mechanical fantasy sculptures which are hybrids of animal and aircraft, and imagine how survivors of a crash would feel about meeting those mechanical creatures.

Hybrid of animal and aircraft

There’s also a really strange coincidence where previously in Epping Forest there had been an old fairground. In the First World War it had been converted to a barracks, and a German plane dropped a bomb which destroyed the fairground and killed a number of soldiers. There’s already an association between entertainment, aircraft and death at that site, and that’s an association which an art audience wants to know more about, whereas a family on a day out at a theme park would probably just find it a bit sick!

Drop From the Sky, proposal for a theme park ride

So does the artistic work ever cross over into the commercial side of things?

It can do yes. The art practise informs the design, it allows me to try things out and see what works, and occasionally take elements and use them in my commercial practise. But in future I could maybe imagine a film about a plane crash, and a theme park wanting to build a ride whose marketing tied in with the film. If it happened, I would definitely want to be the one who designed it!

Backwards, proposal for a theme park ride

Thanks Brendan, I’m sure we’re all glad you’re designing rollercoasters rather than aircraft now! If you want to be part of Brendan’s future research, you can visit Chromo11 and tell about your own thrilling experiences

All images © Brendan Walker unless otherwise stated.