Going with the Lateral Flow

There was time when finding out whether or not a woman was pregnant involved the slaying of a rabbit. In the age of Juno however, pregnancy tests are cruelty free and as easy to access as the corner store, some contrived banter, and a bathroom. And it’s all thanks to lateral flow technology.

Nectar partner company Diagnostic Consulting Network ( DCN ), a contract developer, is at the forefront of harnessing this versatile technology for a wide variety of applications. Lateral flow essentially works by targeting analytes, substances that act as markers for antibodies, hormones, bacteria, psychoactive drugs, and other substances and organisms. DCN has mined the technology to create applications that include a range of medical and veterinary diagnostics, food science, forensics (including technology that detects and amplifies DNA and RNA from crime scenes), agriculture, environmental testing, industrial health and safety, and even detection of possible agents of biological warfare, such as anthrax.

DCN’s Irish-born founder and president, medical microbiologist Dr. Brendan O’Farrell, describes lateral flow technology as an essentially simple process that, while widely used, has more potential than some manufacturers may realize. “A large part of the service we provide for our clients revolves around educating them on some of the more recent and leading edge facets of the technology,” said Dr. O’ Farrell. “For example, we’ve recently seen expansion in the utilization of fluorescents to create detection products that not only more accurately identify markers for a range of substances and organisms, but more accurately tells us the quantity of these factors. As we like to say, lateral flow technology is a field that’s pregnant with possibility.”

(more…)

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Innovation
in the Kitchen

Branding and engineering/product design are usually thought of as two entirely separate disciplines, but a new line of products — available at such mass market retailers as Crate and Barrel, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and Linens and Things — is proving otherwise. The Elemental Kitchen brand, developed by Nectar with Asian-based manufacturer SinoGlass Company, Ltd., is currently proving that design and branding work best when they are intelligently intertwined.

As it happens, intelligence is at the very heart of the Elemental Kitchen , a series of products that present uniquely thoughtful solutions for easy and pleasant food preparation. The collection is led by oil and vinegar dispensers with a patented pump for accurately measured sprays, perfect for precise cooks and diet conscious salad lovers. The Elemental Kitchen also features “Fresh Count Storage” containers, which provide precise electronic information regarding how long food has been stored, and magnetically linked spice jars — available in both salt and pepper pairs and six-bottle sets for easily stackable storage of multiple spices.

The development for each item started with contextual research examining how these kitchen products are used. With this information in hand, Nectar and SinoGlass then worked together to create new product concepts that led to intellectual property suitable not only for the initial products, but for potential multiple spin-off SKUs later on.

Having fashioned a line of products for the kitchen with high consumer appeal and strong sales potential, the next step was to implement the branding strategy designed to tie the products together. Unifying the products under the Elemental Kitchen rubric in terms of both packaging and promotions, the branding theme is strongly conveyed on the front page for the line’s website . Inspired by the periodic table of the elements familiar to all beginning science students, the page illustrates the advanced technological and scientific aspects of each product in the line.

Based in Qindao , China , SinoGlass, is one of the world’s fastest growing houseware manufacturers, currently exporting products to over 150 countries on six continents. While the company has seen a great deal of success in many territories, they have been especially pleased with the progress of the Elemental Kitchen brand.

“In talking to both the consumers and retail chain buyers about the kitchen segment; the one thing that they both appreciated was “meaningful innovation”; i.e. satisfying a need with a smart design that allows the user to do a specific task in the kitchen a bit easier. “ said Cary Chow, Nectar’s Vice President. “We’ve been delighted to have this validated by the news from Sino Glass President Rock Zhang that the brand is now enjoying a terrific response from retailers who have embraced the new brand and its products along with the customers who are enjoying using the items in their kitchens.”

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A Stomach for Entrepreneurship

One of the most exciting and fun aspects of our work at Nectar is helping new businesses, and new business people, start at the grassroots level. One such client is Los Angeles inventor and entrepreneur Tony Marrero, a hardworking family man with a lifelong enthusiasm for physical fitness who spotted an opportunity when he realized that, whenever he went to the gym, he wasn’t finding what he needed when it was time for sit-ups and other abdominal and stretching exercises.

“First of all, with the flat mats they had at my gym, I had to have a partner, and it’s not like I love coming up to a stranger and saying, ‘hey, could you hold my feet down,’” Tony told us recently. “Just as bad, the mats were usually so filthy that I had to carry a can of Lysol with me whenever I went. There were sit-up benches of course, but they weren’t always that easy to use even for a fit guy like me — for someone older and less athletic, they could be a real problem. That when the solution to the problem came to me.”

That solution was the first abdominal exercise device designed especially for solo sit-ups and other abdominal and stretching exercises, a product that Tony dubbed Portable Abmat™. After he had developed the original rough prototypes, the engineering and design staff at Nectar helped to streamline and prepare the product for market, both in terms of actual product design and also branding.

With the first fully portable exercise designed especially for solo sit-ups and other stretching exercises, Tony is optimistic that someday soon exercisers of all ages will be taking advantage of his creation. “Sit-ups and stretching are among the world’s most popular exercises for a reason. When people see how the Portable Abmat™ helps them get the most from their workout by making these exercises easier and more pleasant to accomplish, I think the product will find a healthy spot in the exercise and sporting goods markets.”

For more on Tony’s creation’s, see the product’s website, PortableAbmat.com.

Interacting with a More Creative Future

Shaun Redsar is Nectar’s newest designer and part of an elite group — he’s one of six graduates from the nascent Interactive Product Design ( IPD ) program at Otis College of Art and Design . Located near West Los Angeles, the IPD program takes an artistic approach to design, training creators who “work in the gallery of the real world….” In Shaun’s case, this approach can be seen in some of the young designer’s creations, including the Sephira lamp and the Zygo teapot, both of which were crafted both as art objects for display in galleries, as well as products suitable for mass production.

Of course, not just anyone is capable of this caliber of work, and Otis is known for its rigor. Admissions are selective and based largely on portfolio reviews. Freshman students are expected to show competence in a number of areas including life drawing, color theory, and composition. Otis continues to be a challenging school at every stage — Shaun had twice as many classmates when he started the Interactive Design program as a junior than he did on graduation. However, the rewards for taking this arduous journey are more than just a sense of accomplishment; IPD graduates have been hired by such outstanding companies as Apple, Disney, and, of course, Nectar.

Shaun, who jokingly compares aspects of the school’s approach to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, describes a fully rounded education. “I took as many classes at Otis that focused on the theory and issues of design as I did on the logistics of how to make it work in the real world. It all comes down to creating beautiful objects that improve the quality of life. Otis is not just a big name in the design field; it really did prepare me to work in a creative, but also highly practical, environment like Nectar.”

For more information, visit the Otis College of Art and Design website; and don’t forget to check out Shaun Redsar ’s website for more of his design work.

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Chilling for Recovery

One of the exciting, but also daunting, aspects of developing medical devices is that each new product has the potential to make a difference to untold numbers of patients, sometimes a life-or-death difference. For the last year, Nectar has been working closely with San Diego-based BeneChill to develop a device that could prove massively important, the new RhinoChill System, which has the potential to save lives and reduce or prevent brain damage for victims of cardiac arrest.

Simply put, the device reduces body temperature to 91 degrees Fahrenheit, inducing a chill — “therapeutic hypothermia” is the medical term — that has been proven to reduce mortality and brain damage resulting from cardiac emergencies and comas. Though other devices currently perform this function, the RhinoChill has several features that make it a major advance. It works through a nasal catheter, providing close proximity to the brain and thereby more efficiently cooling the body’s most important organ. Also, the RhinoChill is battery operated and does not require a refrigeration unit as other systems do. This means that it can be easily included in ambulances and other emergency/first-responder settings, including military rescue units.

This portable and non-invasive device is already in use in Europe and has investigational status in the United States. Clinical studies are underway as the product undergoes the various legally required leaps and hurdles before it is approved for clinical use in the U.S.

In the meantime, the staffs of both BeneChill and Nectar are hopeful the product will be widely used in the not too distant future. Our own Le Bui had this to say, “Since cardiac arrest touches so many, there’s every chance RhinoChill may end up saving the lives of untold numbers of people over time. That’s actually kind of mind blowing.”

3-D Printing from Scicon; From “Page” to Part

When we’re explaining what we do here at Nectar, visitors are often amazed to find out that many of our working prototypes are made from parts that have been, literally speaking, printed. Of course, most people think of printing as being a strictly two-dimensional process — ink on paper. Nectar’s frequent collaborator, Scicon Technologies , however, is able to manufacture high quality parts cheaply by copying them directly from a computer-generated, three-dimensional model, and actually printing segments of the model in extremely thin sheets, over and over again. It’s like Kinko’s…times a million. To put it extremely simply, stereolithography works by activating a laser over a vat of liquid photopolymer resin creating a basic pattern. Then, material is added around that, something like a sheet, which, little by little, literally copies the computer-generated design in three dimensions, creating a “printed” component for a prototype product.

Even though we know how they do it, we have to admit that we’re frequently amazed by the fine work our friends are Scicon are able to do when it comes to fashioning actual parts from virtual designs. They provide outstanding services not only in stereolithography (a.k.a. “SLA”) but also in Selective Laser Sintering (a similar process for creating components from CAD drawings), as well as CNC machining and converting 2-D files into 3-D. We really think they they’re capable of doing just about anything when it comes to making stuff materialize out of almost thin air. Now, if we could just get our hands on the complete 3-D design files of a Bugati Veyron . (Yes, we know, that would be wrong. But still….)

Artist in Residence

One of the things we at Nectar love about our hometown of Long Beach, California is its friendliness to the arts. Along with our outstanding local museums and art galleries, you never know where you’re going to bump into some truly talented and creative folks. Take our neighbor, John Sanders. By day, John runs the Marmel Inn, a “Bed and Breakfast for Dogs and Cats.” The rest of the time, he’s a respected fine artist and teacher whose workspace is adjacent to the lodgings of his furry guests.

John, like such artistic big names as Christo and Andy Goldsworthy, is a specialist in site-specific sculptures and environmental installations. He began his artistic career working in clay and ceramics, but during the last thirty years he has moved on to more heavy-duty building materials, including lumber. Past projects have included placing 1,300 shovels in a grid in an agricultural field next to a highway in Long Island, New York.

His current project is closer to home. Titled “49,” it involves arranging forty-nine large galvanized steel stars on the grounds of Marymount College, located in nearby Rancho Palos Verdes. John, who has taught sculpture at both UC Irvine and Cal State Los Angeles, is typical of the low-key city of Long Beach in that he is completely free of pretense. When asked about the “meaning” of “49” his only response was, “I just thought it would look kind of cool.”

If you’d like to get in touch with John about one of his sculptures or installations, or just want to have your pet watched over by someone with the sensitive and creative touch, you can reach him at the Marmel Inn at 562-439-2993.

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Making Children Healthier with Design

We can’t think of a better way to lead off the first issue of elixir than by announcing Nectar’s recent collaboration with the Releef Initiative, an outstanding international non-profit dedicated to improving the health prospects of children in third-world countries and underserved areas by developing new, more effective pharmaceutical products. Working with the initiative, Nectar created a new kind of dispenser designed to administer dosages of tiny medicinal pellets.

Releef developed the pellets because of the difficulty of administering correct amounts of medicine using traditional pills and liquids in impoverished areas. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), overly large or small dosages of antibiotics, pain relievers, and vitamin and mineral supplements are administered, and the difference between an incorrect and a correct dosage can often be a matter of life and death.

To deal with this very serious problem, Releef developed the tiny pellets to make administering the correct dosages easier. However, without a dispenser, ensuring that the tiny pills were consumed was, at best, problematic. The new devices were designed especially to make administering the pellets easy to adjust from the point of view health care workers, as well as child-friendly for the benefit of small patients.

One of a number of pro-bono projects that Nectar has taken on in recent years, these hand-held pharmaceutical dispensers were made using inexpensive raw materials that allow for longer shelf life. Ensuring that the devices are widely available is, Releef tells us, going to be an important contribution to worldwide health. All in all, not bad for a day’s work.

Nectar Client Rates $1.5 Billion Sale

One of our best clients, Pennsylvania medical product manufacturer Viasys Healthcare, Inc., has been acquired by Ohio-based medical giant Cardinal Healthcare, Inc. — a corporate merger to the tune of nearly one and a half billion dollars. With assets in excess of $80 billion and a ranking of fourteenth on the Fortune 500, Cardinal seeks to expand its base in the field of respiratory and other medical devices through the purchase. Viasys earned 2006 sales of $610 million and is a leader in respiratory care and other medical specialties.

Announcing the transaction in a press release, Cardinal CEO R. Kerry Clark said, “Now that VIASYS is part of Cardinal Health, we are ready to move forward and bring our combined offerings to global customers,” adding that “VIASYS is a great strategic fit with Cardinal Health that expands our global presence and provides a new channel to accelerate growth from our other core businesses.” We think this translates as, “it’s a good thing that will allow Cardinal to manufacture great new products and make more money for itself and its stockholders.” Sounds good.

For more on Viasys Products, click here.

“Renewable Plastic”….Say What?

Lately, we’ve been hearing of bloggers who’ve made New Year’s resolutions to reduce their use of plastic or end it entirely — no small task considering the number of goods that are made of plastic or come packaged in the stuff. Considering that petroleum-based plastic doesn’t break down, creates a significant threat to the environment — including the world’s oceans — and isn’t always recyclable, the problem is a nasty one that isn’t going away any time soon.

But maybe not if Cereplast, an innovative firm that Nectar has been collaborating with recently, succeeds on a large enough scale. The Hawthorne-based company takes its name from its practice of substituting fossil fuels with such cereals as corn and wheat to create plastics that are both biodegradable and compostable. Cereplast is currently manufacturing a limited variety of consumer and industrial products to order, but with enough clients there’s no reason that it can’t be making everything from supermarket bags to those damnable clamshell packages that electronic products are sold in. When that happens, bloggers can go back to making resolutions about losing weight and cutting back on trashy reality television. Check out Cereplast’s web site .

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Still, a period of financial contraction means that designers are going to have start thinking a bit differently. Less expensive materials, more efficient use of those materials, and finding ways to build products using less labor. If we’re really clever, maybe we can also find ways to marry reduced cost with more ecologically sustainable processes. And, as Bruce Nussbaum writes, it’s an outstanding opportunity to innovate in economical ways and develop some career-building “cred.” Perhaps not too surprisingly, such innovation occasionally becomes massively popular, but the history of such innovations isn’t always pretty. Sometimes, the results aren’t anything to write home about, either.

Most of you have probably heard something of the story of how, back in 1933, the new Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, submitted drawings to Ferdinand Porsche for an inexpensive car that could be a “people’s car” or volkswagen. Designer Erwin Komenda developed a strange new body design to go with the small car’s efficient engine — but the plan had to be scrapped to deal with the catastrophic world war that Hitler was setting into motion.

After the war, German industry couldn’t afford to stand on ceremony or an excess of good taste, nor did their Allied occupiers want them to. The design for the car that would later become the iconic Volkswagen Beetle was utilized to help revive the devastated economy of post-war Germany, which had become a crucial bulwark in the West’s Cold War battle with the Soviet Union. The fact that the little car had been set in motion by the most hated man of the 20th century was neither here nor there, and the VW Bug became a vehicle that was happily driven by millions of people, including ironically enough, many of the kind of freethinking creative folks who Hitler had dreamed of permanently removing from the earth.

Another product with an interesting connection with the war is Hormel’s best known meat product, Spam. The creation of the product was a simple efficiency. Hormel had been selling canned ham, but that was just one part of the hog. Why not grind the inexpensive and otherwise useless pork shoulder meat into a ham-like product that could also be sold? Though Spam was first marketed in the 1920s, it didn’t really take off worldwide until the war made canned meats an essential means of providing protein during war time shortages and other privations.

Spam became especially popular in the Pacific theater as a way of feeding American soldiers and their civilian allies. To this day, it remains a staple in Hawaii, Guam, and other Pacific islands, and despite a less than glamorous reputation in the U.S., is becoming an increasingly common ethnic staple. (Right now, you can get Spam musubi, a sushi-like combination of spam, sticky rice, and seaweed, at any of the Hawaiian fast food restaurants proliferating all around Southern California.)

And, judging by Hormel’s strange, campy, and entertaining Spam website, the company seems interested in claiming a hipper corner of the sandwich meat market. No longer does the company hide from the mockery its product took during a famous Monty Python sketch. Instead, it’s offering a tie-ins on-line video game inspired by the Python-derived Broadway musical, Spamalot. This is another example of another kind of efficiency that’s smart in any economic climate — turning a liability into an asset by embracing it.

And then there’s the tactic of using the material that you’ve already got on hand. We’ve always loved the legend of how marketing super-guru Herschel Gordon Lewis launched his other claim to fame (well…notoriety) by basically inventing movie gore. The story goes that Lewis, who had already been dabbling in extremely downmarket films with “exploitable elements,” found himself in 1963 with some left over stage blood from another film. Not wanting to waste a thing, he dreamed up the idea of using all of the leftover material in his next film, and therefore found himself a trailblazer in movie horror so nauseating that even the film geek writing this blog refuses to see them.

(The true story of the first splatter film is a bit more complicated but was another example of economy being the mother of invention. Since no one had ever made a gore film before, film censors had no real rules against it and so it was a relatively easy way to attract thrill-seeking young audiences — however, none of the stage blood that Lewis found was realistic enough to be disturbing. Lewis and his colleagues developed a relative of the stage blood currently used in films — a solution that was largely comprised of the sticky antidiarrheal medicine, Kaopectate. Innovation is not always pretty.)

Of course, occasionally a limitation can help creative folks create something that is slightly more artistic. In the early 1980s, the now world-famous independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch was just getting started. In that pre-digital video era, probably the single biggest obstacle to new filmmakers trying to make films was the high cost of the most basic raw material needed — 16mm or 35mm film stock. Still, Jarmusch had obvious talent and Swiss filmmaker Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) gifted him with some “short ends” — portions of left over reels from Wenders’ prior film. Jarmusch simply didn’t have enough film to make anything very lengthy — so he simply dropped the usual filmmaking strategy.

Each scene in his ultra-low-key comedy, Stranger than Paradise, is a single take, separated by black leader. There is no cutting in the usual sense. This bold movie required a great deal of cleverness in how the scenes were staged, which actually became a key part of the film’s style and humor. The movie that resulted was, strangely enough, not a gigantic bore but an international hit which turned Jarmusch into the first truly well-known independent director for “arthouse” productions. Though he now works with big name actors like Johnny Depp and Bill Murray, Jarmusch still makes beautiful and somewhat strange films outside the usual Hollywood system…and he still doesn’t use a lot of cuts. Waste not, want not.

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And, if you’re like some of us who’ve been to swank hotels on business, but then have to switch to more downscale accommodations for personal or family trips, a kind of cognitive dissonance takes over as we try to adjust between the smooth, apparent perfection of staying at a place like this and the sometimes infuriating but also somewhat comforting feeling of a place like this.

At the high end hotel, if they’re doing their job correctly, every need seems to be almost anticipated, sometimes with such alacrity that it can be a little disturbing. At a lower end place, usually nothing is done with much smoothness and everything is a roll of the dice. If a genuine problem arises, you are at the mercy of the fates: is the desk person good-natured or mean, perky or hung-over? Most of the time, even when the staff is trying their best, you’re basically on your own — but that’s okay, you’re a grown-up and you didn’t pay enough to expect to have your hand held.

Of course, at the high end place, you’re kind of hoping to be treated a bit like a highly esteemed infant whose needs must be anticipated and fully catered to. And the kind of hotels that cost several hundred to over a thousand a night are forever working on new conveniences, even regarding something as simple as hotel check-in. (It was reading Jeff Howard’s thoughts on that bugaboo, which we’ve seen in even some outstanding hotels, which got us thinking about this in the first place.) But, for all their usually outstanding service, we never feel fully comfortable.

If you’re used to flying Southwest Airlines, taking a private jet might be a fantasy come true, but it’s also going to be a little weird. The same may apply to the inveterate fan of In-’n-Out Burger who suddenly finds himself downing true Kobe beef at some super expensive restaurant. Genuinely fine gourmet food can sometimes have a sense of unreality about it, particularly if it’s way too expensive.

Which is what takes up to the thoughts of Adam Greenfield, reflecting on a review of the new Motorola U9 phone by writer and actor Stephen Fry. Greenfield keys in on Fry’s use of the word “withcraft” in describing the effect of the phone/MP3 player’s use of a newfangled OLED type display — which seems to exist in a kind of never-never land; there is no apparent “screen,” and therefore a sort of odd “like magic” effect is created.

For Greenfield and for us, such talk immediately conjures Clark’s Third Law, i.e., Arthur C. Clarke’s famed assertion that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, written about thirty years before Clarke was born, illustrates this concept pretty well.)

While Greenfield takes a mostly benign view of the phone itself, he does have some problems with the avid pursuit of magical seeming technology, as he explains to a commenter on his view of this supernatural metaphor as perhaps “disempowering”:

In this context, I think of magic as the ultimate in seamlessness, and while of course Iím not entirely opposed to the use of metaphor in explaining complex systems to their users, neither do I think thatís anything like the right one.

Which is perhaps another of saying that he fears this sort of magical seamlessness infantilizes consumers to a certain extent. Is that why, no matter how many adults are hooked on the Harry Potter books, they’ll always be seen as children’s fiction, no matter that J.K. Rowling might be a better writer than, say, Stephen King? It’s true that there is something tremendously appealing to young children about the idea of magic. As we get older, magic is still kind of fun, but it’s often more enjoyable s to try and figure out the secret to the trick than to pretend it’s really magic.

Being an infant isn’t all bad but, as adorable as two-year olds are, it’s not a good idea to be one forever. Is that why some of us are both delighted and vaguely creeped out by extremely high end hotels, or is that our adult fear of the bill talking?

Peter Pan’s favorite new gizmo?

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Today, however, we came across an example of a literally ancient device updated to the modern age. The idea of a kite-driven ship, which we learned of via Jack Moffett. Of course, this idea has the beauty of being a very easy sell because of its familiarity, simplicity, and the fact that it actually seems to work. It’s the exact inverse of the problem that Richard Ziade discussed last week about certain Internet applications that, while effective, fail to pass what he calls “the mom test.” As in “will my ___-year-old mom understand this product.”

Ziade contrasts e-mail — which is very much like traditional mail — with more leading edge applications like OpenID and even relatively tried-and-true apps like RSS feeds. “RSS lacks a real-life sibling to help people understand its purpose and value,” Ziande writes. “‘It’s like subscribing to a magazine’ doesn’t really cut it.”

So, before designing a new product for the high-tech era, it’s crucial for creators to consider not only whether or not the concept will work, but whether the technologically non-savvy will grasp its usefulness and, if not, just how and whether it’s possible to educate users enough to grasp its benefits. Sometimes a not particularly ground-breaking product may be far easier to sell if it has a low-tech analog.

So much of the reason certain products sell has to do with our level of comfort. Consider the example of a product which we suspect is doing very well right now. The reason the Hamburger Phone is likely to sell a lot of units in the immediate future may have something to do with the luck of its placement in an unexpectedly popular Oscar-nominated comedy, but we also expect that the reason the product may perhaps continue to move units for a few years to come is that it combines two highly familiar products (i.e., hamburgers and phones) in a fun way — while being associated with the smart and likable soon-to-be teenage mother in Juno. The burger phone really passes the mom test.

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First, there is the breakthrough (also covered on NPR) about a new fabric that is by far the blackest material on earth, absorbing almost all light. This material is composed of nanotubes that are, according to Reuters, 400 times thinner than a strand of hair. The head of the project, Rice University’s Pulickel Ajayan, was previously best known for getting in the Guiness of Book of World Records for inventing the world’s smallest brush. Which, we guess, would come in handy for dealing with those way-thinner-than-hair fibers.

The second story was an item in Design News about advances in the production of graphenes, which are described as a literally two-dimensional substance, even thinner than the nanotubes Dr. Ajayan is using for his blacker-than-black fabric which, tiny as they are, still have more than one dimension. Being literally two dimensional — a state of being we didn’t even know was possible until we saw this story, graphenes are mindbogglingly tiny:

ìWe are surrounded by three-dimensional matter and until three years ago we only knew of three-dimensional materials, even carbon nanotubes; it looks very thin, but itís still a cylinder rolled up,î says [Prof. Andre] Geim. ìWe encountered a sort of paradigm of two-dimensional matter, absolutely single layer of atoms in a very high-quality lattice; this is the thinnest possible material in our universe. Nothing thinner can exist.î

That’s pretty thin. But so what? Well, it turns out that with great smallness comes great strength.

ìOn the nanoscale itís tougher than any other material we know; its bond is stronger than diamonds, so if you make a thin layer of diamond it wouldnít be as strong as graphene.î

On a less mindboggling level, we also of course have the big product from MacWorld, the MacBook Air.

Even this last, relatively prosaic product — like all modern computers — involves really small things doing very big jobs in such a way that very few laypeople can begin to comprehend. Almost everyone these days can use a computer, and more and more of us may be able to program a computer, but how many of us actually understand how they work at the micro level? Lots of people can fix a car, but only a few truly understand the physics and electronics involved in today’s automobiles. And how many people can actually fully understand even this blog post on another super-small technology?

And, returning to the nanotubes and graphenes above, these are really just two more examples of the kind of increasingly unimaginable actors that have been discovered over the last 1.5 centuries. Bacteria, viruses, radio waves, microwaves, and the atom — these are all aspects of nature it would be easy for nonscientists to believe were figments of the imagination were the results not so clearly tangible.

So what? Well, the world of design and engineering is inherently a largely technical world, but it still needs to communicate clearly with less technical consumers and businesspeople who may never completely get over their future shock. There’s already a communication gap, and it’s bound to grow. However, we also now we have an imagination gap as fewer and fewer people can even grasp how a product comprised of difficult to describe objects can work.

Of course, once people are convinced a product is safe and works effectively and/or will make them a profit, they’ll gladly use it or sell it without understanding it. Still, with controversies already raging over nanotechnology and genetically engineered foods to name just two examples, we’re going to see more and more caution and confusion as the divide between techies and non-techies grows ever wider. Fortunately, we like challenges.

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In our line of work, we are not ones ones to stand athwart innovation and yell “stop!,” or even “slow down!” What we are saying is that, with all the changes and new devices coming across the transom, it’s useful to consider why so many people are nostalgic for older technology and hesitant to embrace the newfangled. Richard Ziade’s post from last week, “Looking Forward to the Past: The Longing For And Inevitable Return Of The Analog Experience” and his thoughtful closing words got us thinking. To wit:

…..We should be wary of what we assume to be conveniences that people want and at the costs of providing them. It turns out that making the cake from scratch is way more fun than tearing open a plastic wrapper because there are good things to take away from that experience. As we define our value and design around it, we should be as sensitive to what people don’t want as to what we’re certain they do want. It serves us well to respect that delicate balance.

Some of us (well, the guy actually writing this post) got even more thoughtful when Ziade commented parenthetically that the post was written on a steampunk keyboard — a new idea to writer guy but one long in coming. Basically Jake von Slatt of Steampunk Workship has spent hours stripping away the usual sleek trappings of a computer keyboard and replaced them with the supposedly clunkier accoutrements of an antique manual typewriter.

To some, there might be something truly nonsensical about taking considerable trouble and expense to turn an advanced product into a facsimile of a less advanced one — but then ask any writer, particular one who worked in a newsroom (or, in writer-guy’s case, a high school journalism class) and who learned to write on a manual typewriter. There was something about the satisfying clickety-clack of a manual that told the world know that work was getting done. Now, we can type and serenely listen to music in digital stereo, but those those old manual typewriters — and even those newfangled electric models — made a music of their own.

No wonder there are writers — plugged in writers aged well under fifty, it turns out — who simply prefer writing their drafts on manual typewriters and an entire web business devoted to keeping them supplied. It turns out that, for all the immense convenience and flexibility that computers offer writers, the older technologies offer something that the new one misses out on.

Even scribblers…well, typers, who have longer ago decided they would give up major bodily organs before parting with their computers, retain vestigial links to their long-gone typewriters. As author Jonathon Lethem wrote in a Slate piece surveying writers’ preferred computer fonts:

Before computers, I wrote three novels on a typewriter, and there can never be anything but 12-point Courier (double-spaced) forever: I write on an eternal Selectric of the mind. I can even hear the rattle of the metal ball against the sheet of paper, I swear.

Still, the computer offers so many conveniences and new tools to writers that it was all but impossible to resist, even back when clunky old WordStar was the standard. The moment the first word processors came on the scene, enormous numbers of us, eager to ditch the slow inconvenience of correcting ribbons and liquid paper, switched over almost immediately. Loyalty and nostalgia was one thing, but this new technology was just too powerful.

But not all new technologies are, and that’s the rub. That’s why most people are waiting out the current home video wars between HD DVD and Blu-Ray. Regular old DVDs are still such a recent advance — and so much of an improvement over VHS tapes — that the novelty hasn’t really worn off yet and we’re still quite pleased. While we might see the improved resolution of the new technology, we’re not going to go to any excessive expense or inconvenience only to find we’ve saddled ourselves with obsolete technology when we’re perfectly happy with the one we’ve got already.

So it is with newfangled cell phones — a lot of us are still getting used to the very concept of a phone not using a land line and and don’t see much appeal in watching movies on it (way, way, way too small), or texting (what’s wrong with old-fashioned e-mail?), or the like. Many do, of course, but the point is that not all consumers think the same and there are vast audiences out there that designers and engineers may not be properly addressing.

Don’t call them luddites, call them deliberate. To get them, you’re going to have come up with a product that truly make sense, that’s all.

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