Posts Filed Under remade
Lift Asia 08
Photo © Rachel Hinman, Jeju, 2008.
This is the video of my presentation for the session “Aiming for a better society” at the Lift Asia 08 on September 5th. Knock yourself out!
I would like to thank the Lift team Laurent Haug, Nicolas Nova, Sylvie Reinhard, and all the others for the invitation and the opportunity to share the Homegrown story with such an amazing audience in a breathtaking setting.
Thanks to the Nokia Design Homegrown team and extended contributors who made all this happen.
The slides are available here.
Filed Under: charging, conferences, Nokia, product, remade, sustainabilty, ui
Homegrown people planet profit
“Global issues cannot be removed from the business world, as we only have one world in which to operate.” – Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
A few weeks after unveiling remade in Barcelona, we are excited to share the context in which remade and Homegrown came into being.
Our goal with Homegrown, the umbrella project, was and still is to work towards the most sustainable, ethical, and desirable communication solutions for Nokia. We’re not interested in sentimental greenwash, but the cold hard facts. If the intangible human benefits of communicating through our devices are the rewards, it’s the physical things we produce and consume that are the costs. Why are we doing this? The numbers tell the story – it’s our responsibility, it is everyone’s responsibility. And how? Principles in action – we are simply placing sustainability at the top of our design list.
Homegrown nurtured four case-studies: Zero Waste Charger, remade, Wears in not out, and People First.
“At present, phone chargers waste 300mW of standby power when left unplugged.”
There’re roughly 3,000,000,000 phones on the planet which means there’re also 3,000,000,000 chargers. The average charger consumes 300mW on standby. You can do the math. The waste is tremendous. In addition, most mobile phones take only ~60 minutes to fully recharge these days. Yet most of us keep them plugged for hours… while resting at night.
Nokia chargers are energy-star rated and some consume less than 40 mW in standby… but this is still not zero. The design and engineering challenge is not to bring the consumption as close to zero as possible, it is to leapfrog to zero. And the only way to achieve this is to change our ways.
How can we be more energy intelligent? By contextualising and understanding energy usage of the appliances and devices we are using.
Already devices like Wattson are showing us the energy our home is using (visualised in graphs and charts) and help us figure out ways to save electricity. But eventually, appliances and devices will have to be energy smart by nature. The Zero Waste charger is a true power-down charger with a recognisable branded element – the push-button. When pressed, the push-button reassuringly starts glowing, the charger delivers a 1-hour charge cycle and then shuts off. Off as in 0mW. The push-button symbolises Nokia’s commitment to energy saving while reinforcing conscious consumption in the user’s mind.
Contrary to Bruce Mau’s Massive Change, this case study shows that Small actions x Big numbers have a Big impact.
“426,000 mobile phones are retired in the USA daily.”
In remade, recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tires are used beautifully; whilst helping reduce landfill and preserving natural resources. The concept also addresses cleaner engine technologies, and energy efficiency through power saving graphics. It is about turning waste into beauty.
Previews blog posts on this site: Nokia remade, More about remade.
“After 25 years, mobile telephony is considered an established commodity.”
How do we encourage people to keep their products longer? So much so – they might even pass it on…
Created with good design and noble materials, it becomes a phone you want to keep – one that sits comfortably alongside your most trusted possessions. With design decisions driven by sustainability first such as shrewd long term manufacturing investments, timeless design, and no colour variants – this truly is a phone that wears in not out. Inspired from Jan’s work on repair cultures, repairable and replaceable components reduce Nokia’s environmental dust-to-dust footprint and keep pace with your needs. Whether redefining a “voice classic” or supporting enduring features such as SMS, internet, and clock – these devices are grounded in mature technologies, open standards, and simple durable execution.
In this context, personal digital content portability and software designed for decades of consumption are an integral and key part of the offering. A suite of services and physical doors enable to safely manage one’s growing digital lifetime. I will return to this topic later since it deserves more than a few lines.
“50% of a phone’s energy demand is backlighting.”
How can we clearly prioritize people first? If we begin designing for those who face daily challenges with current technology, we soon find communication solutions that benefit us all.
With a focus on human universals, the “People-first” experience strips away the complexity of applications, folders, and unpredictable navigation with simpler universally understood organizing principles: time, lists and faces. Content comes first, navigation is shallow, and there are no metaphors or abstractions to confuse. New content is generated at the top of a singular vertical list settling over time into a personal history of events.
A dual layer display allows the user to balance energy efficiency with rich visuals. The user interface graphics are optimized for low-power and high-contrast B&W graphics. When an item is highlighted, a second full color display is partially activated in lieu of, or in combination with the first.
In an effort to increase local relevance, dynamic keymat graphics, based on a low-power bi-stable display, allow a greater number of language variants at little to no extra cost and on-screen actions are presented in textual and iconic form making the system accessible to a larger audience.
Out of the box, People First allows simply to connect synchronously (voice call or push-to-talk) or asynchronously (sms or email), capture a moment with the camera, schedule an appointment with the alarm clock, and manage money with the calculator. These are what we believe the mobile essentials – features that are relevant everywhere for everyone. These essentials are however sometimes insufficient. Instead of second-guessing additional features, we are encouraging personalization, hacking, and entrepreneurial ventures with widgets support, accessible native programming language (as simple as html) and freely available hardware and software specifications. Locally produced or crafted components and software provide relevance, while simultaneously reducing production efforts and the amount of atoms that need to be shipped around the globe.
Homegrown is primarily Andrew Gartrell, Rhys Newman, Duncan Burns, Pascal Wever, Raphael Grignani, Pawena Thimaporn, Tom Arbisi, and Simon James.
Additional words and pictures are available on Nokia Conversations, the press section of Nokia.com, and Julian’s blog.
NYT on what we do
A couple of weeks ago, Laura Holson came to our studio in Los Angeles to discuss the things we do. Her article was published this morning. Although it is an industry-wide piece, a large portion is describing our idealistic views and unusual methods at Nokia Design.
The group is the first of its kind at Nokia, the world’s No. 1 seller of mobile phones, bringing together 14 designers and researchers from California and Helsinki, where the company is headquartered. Their charge is to tell Nokia’s top executives not only what consumers will want next year, but 3 to 15 years from now.
[...]
“Design used to be inconsequential: just make it pretty, make it sell,” said Mr. Newman, who, along with three members of his team, was interviewed at Nokia’s design center near a strip mall in downtown Calabasas, north of Los Angeles. Now, he said, “we have to think about human fundamentals.”
[...]
When asked if they felt pressure to design new phones more quickly in an increasingly competitive market, Mr. Chipchase responded with a quizzical stare. “Why do you want to innovate faster?” he asked. “Are you innovating something gimmicky just to sell a product? Or is it saving the planet you are after?”
Also Rhys and I ended up having our mugs and fast moving hands pictured! Good laugh…
NYT – Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip By Laura M. Holson
More about remade
The intent was to create a device made from nothing new, distilling utility from the materials already circulating above the earth’s crust. We drew on a simple insight that in the not too distant future humanity will have extracted and worked much of the valuable minerals once buried in planet Earth. We will be compelled to reuse and celebrate what is essentially “above ground”.
We proposed the mechanical skin & bones be made from materials readily available in the lithosphere avoiding the need for extracting resources and reducing landfill.
- Major structural elements are crafted from recycled aluminium courtesy of soda cans with the knowledge that recycled aluminium requires 95% less energy than processing its raw counterpart.
- More intricate plastic parts are moulded from upcycled post-consumer PET from plastic drink bottles, with a lower carbon footprint than any other engineering- or bio- polymer.
- Whole & shredded rubber tyres are increasingly redirected to landfills, but contain a wealth of nutrients that can be extracted and for example re-employed as flexible keymats, dust/water gaskets, or impact protection.
A typical mobile phone contains approximately 44 of the 112 elements known to mankind. Through a principle of economy, we have reduced the number of components within the phone and considered more environmentally friendly technologies such as printed electronic components on non-toxic substrates.
The concept includes a number of features improving the energy efficiency. Drawing upon the fact that more than 50% of the energy a phone uses comes from backlighting the screen, we developed a new graphical look and feel that save energy without compromising style. Additionally, we have prototyped a series of no waste chargers, which power down once the phone is fully charged. This saves the typical 300 milliwatts of standby power wasted when we leave a charger plugged in.
The many small actions illustrated above, when multiplied by large numbers, can indeed change the world.
And most importantly, it works 
Post co-authored with the remade team.
Filed Under: design, Nokia, remade, sustainabilty, ui
Nokia remade
With Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo presenting a short video of the REMADE mobile phone during the Mobile World Congress 2008, I am able to share one of the case-studies addressing sustainability our team* has been working on passionately.
The intent was to create a device made from nothing new.
We drew on a simple insight that in the not too distant future humanity will have extracted and worked much of the valuable minerals once buried in planet Earth. We will be compelled to reuse and celebrate what is essentially “above ground”. Thus we explored the use of reclaimed and upcycled materials that could ultimately change the way we make things.
In remade, recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tyres are used beautifully; whilst helping reduce landfill and preserving natural resources. The concept also addresses cleaner engine technologies, and energy efficiency through power saving graphics.
Remade offers a realistic and beautiful interpretation of upcycling and a tangible starting point for discussion. A discussion we have already started a few weeks ago when two designers from our team joined Jan Chipchase and a few others in Accra to discuss, test, and improve remade with the help of the wonderful people of Ghana.
A local repair technician assembling a remade phone. Jan Chipchase – Accra, Ghana.
Our design team is very excited to join the conversation and have the opportunity to engage and receive critical feedback from all of you.
The press release, short video and additional images are available in the press section of Nokia.com – under the materials section and in the Mobile World Congress 2008 press site. You may also find the short video on Nokia Conversations YouTube channel.
*Andrew Gartrell, Duncan Burns, Rhys Newman, Pascal Wever, Tom Arbisi, Simon James, Pawena Thimaporn, Jan Chipchase, Anne Coates, Peter Knudsen and myself
Filed Under: design, Nokia, remade, sustainabilty, ui
The most natural form of organisation
Both in design circles and the press, there’s a lot of attention and enthusiasm for high-end multimedia products and user interfaces. It is all well but it’s all niche. Nothing wrong with niche products, but ultimately, it’s the less snazzy ones that happen to change the world for good. The Ford T comes to mind along with the Nokia 3310, VW Beetle, etc.
Inspired by an observation that globally 1 in 5 adults are illiterate, but not necessarily innumerate and that the digital divide will be partially closed in the coming 3 years; my interest in the past few weeks has been on understanding human universals. A simple question I have tried to answer and make tangible is how do we -all humans, organize things naturally? How do we all organize the most important moments of our life? My best answer, as simple as it sounds, is chronologically…