Hi, I'm Phnam.
Hi, I'm Mardis.
And we're the hosts of Future Future, where two designers talk about the future of everything.
We're in the business of turning science fiction into reality for a better future.
And today, we're going to talk about Natural Design.
So Phnam, have you ever had that feeling where you're wearing a pair of sunglasses that are
sliding down on your head, you're wearing headphones, they don't quite fit right, or
even a wearable, a smart watch or something, and somehow we get, "fatigue?"
It's wearing on your body for a little bit, it doesn't feel right.
And we start to ask ourselves, "how do we solve for this?
How do we solve for these issues that directly relate to ourselves?"
So, a lot of the trends in design today - physical hardware design - are about simplifying.
You see a lot of rounded corner rectangles, flat surfaces, very elegant transitions.
The thing about a lot of them is they feel like consumer electronics tacked onto our body.
And that is the wrong way of going about designing something that you have to live with!
That's why today we're talking about natural design.
Natural design is everything that encompasses the integration of
technology onto our body so it makes it easier.
So, technology is great. We all love it, but we don't want this object living on us.
It's like, "are you going to wear that 1980s watch with the digital calculator on it?"
Yes, that's amazing, but most people really want something that integrates with their life just a little bit better.
So we can talk about an extreme example, when we design medical products for example.
People who need devices to help with their day to day life, they don't want to be superheroes
or have this crazy thing.
I mean, perhaps some of them do, but most of them just want to be normal.
Getting away from that idea of, "I have a disability, I need help" is really what we want.
We want to just be ourselves.
And what that means is we have to design products that don't call too much attention,
that are not too complex to use or to learn to use.
Things that are like, "okay, I'm going to put this on in the morning, I'm going to use it all day,
trigger it whenever I need it, and then kind of forget about it."
Forgetting about a device that you have on is a step towards making it normal.
It's about ergonomics, right?
Yes.
"How does this fit on my arm? Is it fit for me? Is it very considerate?"
This is where we step deeply into human factors in doing a little bit of research and
interviewing people and testing multiple products over and over again -
throughout the design process of course -
until we really get something that's made just for that individual or that class of individuals.
We can categorize them in between shapes, sizes, and user needs,
and this helps us develop this story of ergonomics and comfort.
One example of ergonomic work that we've done is the Human Headphones that you can see right here.
These are the first on-ear headphones that you can put on your ear just like that.
There's no band between the two halves.
And one thing that's wonderful about this design is it looks fairly natural on the body.
It is sort of reminiscent of the shape of an ear without looking as strange as an ear.
It is also reminiscent to the shape of a pebble, which is very soft on the surface,
very inviting, and very natural to the contact of the skin.
So besides the shape of this product, the interaction that you have with the headphones is also natural.
A typical consumer electronic product typically has buttons and LEDs and all those things that say,
"if you push here, it will do that," whether it's on/off buttons, whether it's volume control, etc.
And if you don't know - buttons in nature don't exist.
Just doesn't exist!
You don't walk up to a tree and [boop], "hey, look at that."
You don't turn on the sun, you don't do this.
This is a human-manufactured thing, an old world industrial engineering concept
of how to interact with the natural environment.
So if we think about the future of how to design products for more natural interactions,
we think about sliding, like this, to skip the song forward
or going up like this, or down to control the volume of the song you're listening to.
Or, instead of an on/off button,
you turn them off by just putting them back together with the support of a magnet.
To turn them on, you just separate the two halves. That's it!
So you're not really going out of your way to engage a button or
do something or think through a user experience because the user experience is all about you
and how you would normally interact with the environment anyway.
And that's why when we designed the Human Headphones,
it was about creating something that's really deeply intuitive.
Another reason why natural design is a great inspiration for
designing products of the future is:
there are certain things that are universally beautiful
that make you feel a certain way,
and good design is about controlling how the users - the audience - feel in the presence of your product.
Do they feel comfortable? Or do they feel constrained?
Do they feel like it's something they want to use every day of their lives?
Or do they want just to use it for a week or two and then forget about it?
Some of these products are quite expensive,
and it's not very responsible to use something for a short amount of time and then forget it in a drawer.
It's not that sustainable.
So really getting back to the feeling of why we're integrating natural shapes,
natural surfaces, perhaps natural colors, natural use of materials,
is because we as humans want to be a little bit closer to nature,
closer to interactions that we have naturally,
and there is a certain level of beauty in it.
And surrounding ourselves with that kind of beauty is modern in some way.
You go out in nature and your heart rate goes down.
You interact with organic objects and it lowers your stress levels.
It's really basic, almost obvious, but somehow in our industrial revolution
of creating technology we lost our way.
This is why not only wearables but objects around the home
are starting to integrate more fabrics, materials that are a little less common to
plastic designed parts, things that are a little more human, have a better touch, a
better visual appeal.
They look a certain way from a distance so you get up close and
they have their own personality that is very relatable.
So the takeaway of this video is that if you marry engineering,
the development of wonderful components that do wonderful things,
if you develop natural interactions that people learn intuitively,
if you develop superior ergonomics that really truly fit the body,
and if the aesthetics are reached to the point where it's really beautiful and it's really reminiscent
of something that reminds us of nature, you can actually come up with products that look to the future,
that people really look forward to using.
We encourage you designers, creatives, or anybody developing a product
to really think of design that way.
Let's stop putting out rectangles with rounded corners!
Yeah!
Yeah, because we've seen so many of them.
And really think about what people want in their lives.
So, we do this all the time at Nonfiction.
We integrate these ways of thinking about products, how we can elevate the product and experience,
not for the product's sake but for your sake.
For the people around us and the users that interact with it all the time,
we want to elevate the experience on a whole new level.
Thank you for joining us today on this bit of brainstorming and creative searching.
We hope to see you next time.
Thank you.
Bye!