The Swiss Army knife of digital media (apparently)

Last week I went to the Kenneth Grange exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

I knew something of his approach to design – which leans heavily on the use of models and prototypes – from his work on the InterCity 125 High Speed Train and I though there might be some lessons to learn (however tangential) for my own work at Thumbswood on prototyping digital user experiences.

Walking around the exhibition, Making Britain Modern, what struck me was the shock of discovering just how much the man had influenced my life, without me even knowing.

It was also some of the best evidence I have ever seen to prove how much good design and an accompanying focus on the user can enhance products and the impact they have on our lives.

The first flash of recognition came with the Kenwood Chef food mixer.

As a kid growing up in the ‘seventies, it seemed that the mum of every friend I had owned one of these, whirring away in the corner of their kitchen, mixing the latest cake to be scoffed down at the end of a hard day of play.

We had one at home, too, always on the counter-top, always working, never put away. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the mixer my Mum uses.

Then, the cameras. In fact, the very first camera I owned, a 110 format film Kodak Instamatic 330. I remembered what a delight these were to use – the drop-in film cartridge, the handy telephoto lens, the hard case that cleverly doubled as a handle, and the shape, perfect to hold and all the buttons so easy to reach.

On display were samples of the wooden models Grange used to test out the shape and size of the cameras with end-users – a process that convinced him to make the cameras slightly larger than he had originally intended because testing the models showed that the larger size was more comfortable for people to use.

And then, I saw the pen. Not just a pen – the pen.

As I mentioned, I grew up in the ‘seventies, but the junior school I went to took its teaching model straight out of the ‘fifties. Boys wore shorts, times tables were learnt by wrote, history was a narrative of British omnipresence and infallibility. You wrote with a fountain pen – biros were the Devil’s writing tool.

My parents bought me a succession of cheap, no-name fountain pens that each lasted about five minutes before they either leaked, burst, split, disintegrated, or, on one memorable occasion, squirted their inky black contents into the mouth of a teacher who had inadvisedly decided to chew on the end of my pen while scrawling nasty comments over my attempts at long multiplication. To me, fountain pens were crap.

Then, it all changed.

Arguing that it made sense to go a little bit upmarket to get a pen that had at least a chance of lasting to the end of term, I manipulated my Mum into buying me the sleek, brushed-steel, modern-looking fountain pen that had just taken centre-stage in the window of the local WH Smith.

The pen was a Parker 25.

It certainly looked good. But, it also wrote well. It felt good in the hand. It lasted until the end of term – and well beyond. It was head and shoulders above the competition.

And, it was designed by Kenneth Grange, although I had no idea of this until I went to the Design Museum last week.

I had that pen for something close to 15 years. It lived with me through junior school and then into my bog-standard comprehensive. It came to Poly with me. It’s impossible to remember how many notes, essays and exam papers that pen helped me write over that time – I guess, it’s in the tens of thousands. It never let me down.

But, that pen didn’t just work on a functional level – it worked emotionally, too. It was my pen – I was proud of it, I loved that pen. It made me a fountain pen user for life (for which I am eternally grateful). The only reason I still don’t have the pen is that, when moving out of my first set of digs at Poly, I lost it.

I had an affinity for that pen, so I replaced it with another Parker 25 – this time, a black one.

At the exhibition, there was a sheet of paper on which Grange had repeatedly sketched out what the Parker 25 could look like, each drawing slightly different, each helping him get a little closer to his desired design.

It suddenly dawned on me how much I was in debt to Grange and his approach to design – all that hard work had made my life better.

I can’t possibly hope to have the effect that Kenneth Grange has had. But, that’s no reason not to try, or at least use his method as inspiration for my own approach.

One of my reasons for setting up Thumbswood, my user experience design consultancy, was a desire to champion in digital media the use of frequent, iterative prototypes that can be put in front of users to gain their insight and feedback, before a release solution is finally developed and launched.

Occasionally, it’s useful to have that approach validated – Making Britain Modern certainly helped.

Thanks, Kenneth Grange. Especially for the pen.

You can see Kenneth Grange speaking about his work in this video.

This is an edited version of a post
which was first published on the Thumbswood blog.

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