DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

With the recent announcement of the Royal Wedding in 2011, the Royal family seems to be everywhere you look in the media at the moment with speculations about when it will be, what the wedding dress will look like and even punters betting on what colour the Queen’s hat will be on the big day. However, another member of the Royal family who featured in the press recently was Prince Philip who last week handed out the Prince Philip Designer’s Prize 2010. Now in its 51st year this annual award, which is run by the Design Council, recognises a person that has made a lifetime contribution to design. This year’s lineup was pretty impressive and amongst the nominees were avant-garde fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, creator of the London 2012 Aquatics Centre Zaha Hadid and influential graphic designer Neville Brody. However, I was really pleased that my favourite to win the award from the start (not just because he is an industrial designer) Bill Moggridge walked away with the award. However, not knowing all that much about him, I decided to dig a bit deeper into his past and discover why he was indeed such a worthy recipient of this award.

In 1969 after completing his studies in industrial design Moggridge set up his own design consultancy in London. Having ranked up a pretty impressive portfolio over the years, he went over to California in the late 1970s looking for a good location to set up a US outpost. It was here where he picked up his first major client - John Ellenby who had set up GRiD Systems to develop a wholly new type of portable computer that would be small enough to carry around but powerful enough to still do the job that a desktop computer could. Although there were some luggable computers around at this time they were the size of sewing machines and Ellenby wanted a product that could fit inside a briefcase. He tasked Moggridge with creating the physical design of what would be known as the GRiD Compass. In an interview by Debbie Millman in the podcast show Design Matters Moggridge conveys how in order to find out what the max weight of the laptop should be he got everyone in the company to carry around what they would normally have in their briefcases together with one pound weights. They had to then had to let him know at what weight it became unbearable. This weight was 8 pounds and so Moggridge designed the product to weigh no more than this.

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