Category: GEL

design, GEL, GEL conference, gel2008, innovation, new product development

Repost of Alex Lee from OXO

Christa Avampato

Last Spring I was fortunate to be able to attend the GEL conference in New York City. One of the people on the slate of incredible speakers was Alex Lee, CEO of OXO. The fine people at Good Experience who organize the conference sent me a link to a video that is now posted to highlight Alex’s talk. I wanted to repost my article, now complete with video, so you can enjoy on the great talk that has had me thinking intently about functional design ever since! Cheers (and thanks to Good Experience!)

You may not know the name “OXO“, though you undoubtedly have seen their products in the kitchen gadget aisles. And their anonymity shouldn’t surprise anyone – after all, their CEO, Alex Lee, believes that designers should be overshadowed by the simplicity and beauty of their own designs. Whether it’s making an incomparable salad spinner or an ingenious measuring cup, the reaction OXO is always looking for from users is their lack of notice of the object. It should be so intuitive and easy to use that its use should go unnoticed, like walking, like breathing.

Alex also made several points about dignity. OXO seeks to design products that are usable by the greatest percentage of the population possible. The goal is to design beautiful products without increasing cost, while maximizing functionality, and never making a user feel like “I’m using this easy-to-use product because I am unable to use another one that is more complicated.”

He and the talented design team at OXO have several axioms that they work and live by. Products should be:
Easy to use
Easy to understand
Use honest language
Instructions not required

As far as finding inspiration for worthy design projects, OXO also makes that search simple. They find objects that cause people some sort of pain or frustration, even if they don’t know that they are frustrated. And then they develop a design remedy to alleviate the pain. For example, why should I need to get my eyes down to counter level to observe a meniscus to see if the liquid I’ve measured is at the right level? I should be able to comfortably observe it from overhead. I didn’t realize that, but OXO did. Design so brilliant you wonder how you ever did without it…

Alex Lee at Gel 2008 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

adventure, creativity, GEL, Mark Hurt, technology, travel

Currents

Christa Avampato

The best thing about working for a boss whose title is Consigliere is that he knows other equally brilliant Consiglieres. My boss recently introduced me to Mark Hurst and the GEL conference. (You can find more information about Mark, the conference, and Mark’s company, by clicking http://www.goodexperience.com/. (Coincidentally Mark is a friendly, engaging guy who lives just a few blocks away from me. I love this town!) The GEL conference is a once-a-year event that bring together brilliant thinkers and innovators from many different fields to share their ideas, concerns, experiences, and hopes for the future. The brain power in these conferences at any given moment is nothing short of incredible.

Mark was kind enough to send me a few DVDs with some footage from last year’s event. There were two speakers whose work really struck me as something that I could write about on this blog. One of them is Marie Lorenz. She’s a boat builder, artist, and tidal expert who lives right here in New York. She started a project called the Tide and Current Taxi. She sent an email to everyone she knew in New York, asked them to give her two points that they visited often (around the costs of the islands that comprise New York City) and then invited them into one of her boats to navigate between those two points using only the current of New York City’s rivers. They rarely got exactly where they were trying to go, though she always got a great story. And really, it’s always about the story and we rarely ever end up exactly where we thought we were going. We’re in it for the journey.

In her talk at GEL, Marie explained that on one trip, the current had become particularly rough in the East River, and more and more water lapped up into the boat, causing it to sink, no matter how much she and her friend paddled. They ended up letting go of the boat and everything inside of it and had to swim to the shore of Roosevelt Island. Marie was so upset, so discouraged. She and her friend nearly drowned, and she had lost the project. It was now floating out there in the East River, menacingly, upside down, right near one of the strongest currents in the world. Her heart was broken.

And a moment later, she climbed over the short fence between her and the East River, and she dove in. Like hell that current was getting her boat and her gear! She swam diligently out to the boat, scooped it up, and swam back to shore with all her might. She had worked too hard on this project to let it all go down the current.

It made me think about all the times I’ve worked so hard for something, paddled furiously in the wake of impending disaster, only to end up swimming for the shore. Like Marie, on occasion my heart was broken and so I dove back in, in an effort to salvage was was taken away. The salvaging has never worked quite as well for me as it did for Marie – each time I ended up discarding the very thing I dove back in for once I realized it would have been better to let it remain out at sea and for me to move on. Though I suppose that’s better than having it drift away and never being sure of whether or not you needed or even wanted it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those currents that surround this island I am making my home on. I don’t think I’ll ever look at them quite the same way as I did before Marie’s talk. Sometimes they carry us to some place new that wasn’t on our itinerary, and sometimes they take away everything we’ve got leaving us able to do nothing else but swim to shore. I guess the trick is to know the difference – when is the vessel that carries you worth paddling like hell for, when is it better to just let it fall away, and what makes some of these vessels so special that they are worth diving back in to rescue?

For more information about Marie, visit http://www.marielorenz.com/.


The above image can be found at http://www.destination360.com/caribbean/bahamas/images/s/bahamas-boat-rental.jpg.