Kettle Project : The Market Teardown History Aesthetics Process Concepts Costing Induction
In the last blog post, I came up with an exhaustive list of new kettle concepts, so the next stage is to have a think about how this open thinking can best contribute to my stated goals, and to whittle down this huge bank of ideas into one deliverable one. Going back to my initial stated aims I made at the start of the project:
My main aim is not to 'reinvent' the kettle by coming up with a world of delightful future-spec, premium price innovations, but to get close to the realities of the market as it is, and to see if or how we can use the domain of the 'industrial designer' to make small, deliverable changes to a very cheap machine.
Basically I'm addressing what is often a niggling feeling in any designer; why is everything so ugly, why is every cool thing expensive, and why can't manufacturers of middle-brand products just do it right? The silent designer's dream being a utopia of mid-range Dieter Rams products, long lasting, timeless and exclusively available to all. No more confusion, no more panic.
Cost is a very important discussion point here, and I placed a variety of machines over a scale, and asked why "you are asked to pay many multiples of the basic price to increase function and 'visual appeal'".
I have had a much deeper analytical look over all this over the last week, going back over more models, mainly on argos.com. I have reverse-engineered a cost tree of consumer side prices, and looked at how each individual feature tends to affect price.
Starting with the £5 base model, it is surprisingly easy to knock together a predictably accurate 'shopping list' of features, seeing how each additional hard improvement tends to come with a step-progression of price. All of these kettles have control equipment from one of two brands, as discussed earlier, so it is reasonable to assume that on the manufacturing side (in china) that prices would step up in this way also.
As we push into the higher price brackets however, which again use the same components, we fail to account for ever-higher prices, this time with no understandable increase in performance. This is seen above especially in the DeLonghi and Dualit models, which despite strong brand presences are still made in china like the rest.
Looking at a few models in even further depth, especially top-of-the range models, we find it even harder to sensibly account for logical increases in price. This hypothetical economic model itself does kind of makes sense, I would pay £43 for an acrylic, digital, black, brandless kettle that wasn't made in Germany, (you do pay £54 for a branded one) and therefore I reckon that the price has been escalated by about twice the amount based on it's european manufacture.
What we see however, especially with the Alessi Model, and in any developed market, is an increasing loss in cost-effectiveness as brand, 'Design' and luxury take over the pricing scheme. Basically, 'soft' costs take over an increasingly large part of the price tag, but unlike in high-end audio or cars or bicycles; with household appliances we get literally no functional benefit, not even diminishing returns.
What this does then is challenge the validity of the proportional 1,3,9 rule we have been taught in school, a gaping hole emerges as prices and brand perceptions increase.
This is a rather trivial example, there is obviously no way that the material costs of the Alessi are £15. Of course it was always recognised that the 1,3,9 rule was a guide and not a natural law, but in it's teaching to Product Design Engineers it misses out the central teaching point that a large part of our job as designers is precisely to inflate the market value of our products way beyond their basic value as natural minerals.
As we diverge further from the basic example of a kettle, soft costs increase further, they are the non-linear component of the price. The more you pay, the less you pay more for. These soft costs, namely, are colours, materials, brands and marketing buzzwords. We can therefore see than in kettle design specifically, and likely many other fields by extension, the role of the designer, especially as form-maker is exactly to do his/her best to inflate these soft costs. Anything else is mere specification.
Many features of 'well designed' products: high quality materials, cultural relevence, timelessness, lack of planned obsolescence and first-world manufacture; are necessarily expensive. Products of this type become symbols of this increased value, either by confirming these luxuries visually (chrome, gold, functionalism, parametracism, neo-classicalism, minimalism), and/or through these qualities becoming widely understood and associated with brands in middle-class circles. Good design in many cases is by definition not for the poor.
I guess cheap things are cheap. Everyone knows by now how to do Ramsian 'good design' and Bosch, being the token 'German' brand are the best placed to deliver it. But having gone through the effort, it makes every bit of sense to charge accordingly, and take advantage of the inflated brand values that have just been generated. Why don't the generic products from Chinese factories have this 'helvetica' style? Because it's easier and cheaper to print wobbly, vague plastic forms than it is to fight against production logic in an effort to get straight lines and square corners.
The fact that 'good design' is actually only an additional item of cost should come as no suprise to an economist, but is rather an existential crisis for designers who are consistently taught through the examples of the Bauhaus, of Braun and in the writing of Victor Papanek (most of whose products received little reception on the free market) that we should be 'considerate', 'ethical' or 'emancipatory' in our approach to design. The reality is that to make 'good design' a cultural norm, to have design objects as a universal solution requires positive social action against the existing market forces. Not design at all then, but politics.
Parametric Pat recognises the matter, but does he respond in the correct way?
So we have reached the nihilist conclusion that design, especially in a visual sense, is merely an economic blunt instrument. What options then, does a product designer have?
One could take the route of Parametric Pat, or of that great American Raymond Loewy, and accept this conclusion wholeheartedly, recognising the intrinsic marketing value of form-making. Wether one openly admits this to consumers is another question. It is essential to note however that skill is certainly still required here, a marketeer doesn't just decide to be a bastard overnight and wake up with super-human manipulation skills, although it is the first step. It is still necessary to carry out the diligent process, erase all mistakes possible, make sure it isn't actually ugly, and provide a convincing, succinct and well-developed proposition, just without any grand ethical delusion.
From a consumers perspective, hope is not at all lost. Focusing on the matter not as a designer trying to convince the masses of the benefit of his or her own skills, but as a consumer trying to make the right decision, their own intelligent consumption is the solution. A minimalist can already buy the MUJI kettle, a real minimalist could semi-ironically buy the very cheap £5 products and make a statement from it, high-tech stainless-steel kitchen types can buy a catering kettle and the German rationalist can spend too much on the Ritter. There seems to be in design circles (especially with me) a lot of "why don't they just buy the good stuff", but this is largely an overinflation of one's own value as a trained and educated designer.
The ray of hope for Product Design Engineers is Innovation. This is a totally comfortable and core part of the 'evil' market. Anything designed that is genuinely more efficient in cost and/or performance, but also in terms of taking advantage of current user difficulties, has a positive and real benefit to the human cause. These things aren't automatic though unfortunately. They aren't magically drawn from 'process', 'research' or plodding through pinterest. They require talent, financing, opportunism, inspiration and, most importantly, luck.
The best we can do as designers hoping for a better world is to acknowledge the politics and the economics to best use them to our advantage, and to rigorously practise the process, so that when the idea comes (which could take thirty years) we are best placed to implement it.
***
I started out this project looking to make minor adjustments to the cheap kettle to make it better, without making it more expensive. The below few ideas are decent examples of how I would go about that.
However, given the above arguments I have perhaps derived a better path for this project to follow. And these 'revelations' are probably of little surprise to a lot of people, but are a lesson for myself. Innovation, being the one of the limited number of positive hopes in a narrow and unforgiving world will be a better use of my time.
I think the Induction Kettle is the most refreshing of my ideas so far. In it's pursuit I will at the very least give myself the challenge of designing for a new archetype, and at best give myself a solid and perhaps (hopefully I mean) painful engineering challenge.
My fair maiden, eBay awaits. Let's engineer.
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