6. Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
The Punkt Mobile Phone
(2m 4s reading time)
Marketing departments spend their lives trying to tweak an existing product to make something ‘new’ in an effort to create interest. To claim it’s the best in the world or has some ‘revolutionary’ feature which will change your life for the better.
In the main, this is being economical with the truth. And that’s the polite way of putting it. There may be a small improvement, but on the whole, a ‘new’ iteration of a product is not really that at all. It could just be a change of packaging design, or worse, a reduction in contents to squeeze more profits out.
I should know. Before I set up Brighter Side, I worked for well known brands and helped peddle some of these claims.
It’s one of the reasons why Rams eventually left Braun. The Gillette marketing departments insisted on launching ‘new’ products which were created for the sake of it. They weren’t better than what went before. Just different. And that wasn’t a good enough reason for Rams.
Which brings me to The Punkt mobile phone, designed by Jasper Morrison.
This phone ‘only’ does what a mobile phone was initially invented for... and one or two things more. It encourages talking. For example, the angle on the back of the phone keeps the speaker clear when resting on a table. This makes it ideal for conference calls.
There’s no music, email, social media, selfies, or What’s App installed on the phone. There are no apps. You won’t be sucked into upgrade cycles as you have already decided that specs are not the be all and end all so why be tempted by something more?
But this phone is not completely about detoxing your digital lifestyle. Their aim is to tame technology. To put you in control of your notifications, rather than ridding your lives of them.
It markets itself as a phone and a tethering machine. So when you want to get up to date with emails or social media, you can go to a cafe (independent of course), link it to your tablet or laptop and get online using their BlackBerry Secure protection (yes BlackBerry still exist). This means you don’t have to risk using the public WiFi and it’s inherent security risks.
In contrast, I have an iPhone. According to a poll, using the phone to make voice calls is the 11th most popular use for a smartphone. So this is possibly the most misleading name ever for a product....
Shared under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. With thanks to Dieter Rams and Vitsoe.
