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Designing a Bottle

blog.soylent.com

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Re: Designing a Bottle

#131

Post by ckastner »

staticassertion wrote: post #123
ckastner wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe they are trying to do something, but it has more to do with marketing and product placement than with design. Lastly, we did our best to follow the “less but better” teachings of 1960’s Braun designs. These enduring designs are known for their stripped down features and clean lines. No unnecessary buttons or extraneous curves, just what you need; everything in its place. It's a bottle. There's no need to…

This is silly. Your argument is still "It's a bottle therefor stop making a big deal about it" - it's someone's job to care about it. They explain the problem they set out to solve, how they solved it, a background to how these problems are solved (I don't know shit about design, so the "less but better" reference is actually interesting). If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes en…

No. My argument was that a bottle was a vessel with a cap, and evoking Braun's “less but better” approach, while interesting (iconic, even) in itself, is unnecessary. To me, it merely sounds like pointless name-dropping.

Re: Designing a Bottle

#132

Post by ckastner »

zichy wrote: post #129
staticassertion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Your argument is still "It's a bottle therefor stop making a big deal about it" - it's someone's job to care about it. They explain the problem they set out to solve, how they solved it, a background to how these problems are solved (I don't know shit about design, so the "less but better" reference is actually interesting). If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes en…

It's more about being pretentious. If you show me a nice program you coded, I'd say "that's cool". If you show me a nice program you coded and tell me that you've been inspired by John Backus, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, I'd say "yeah well it's still a program".

Thank you -- that's exactly how I feel about the Braun reference.

The "program" here being one of the simplest imaginable, with literally thousands of years of prior art.

Re: Designing a Bottle

#133

Post by Piccollo »

softwarelimits wrote: post #75

Inacceptable! Unfortunately "designers" nowadays feel more like self-loving "artists" rather than problem-solving engineers - we need better education! "Inventing a plastic bottle in 2017" - this could be joke, but the ignorance behind it makes me angry. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782/tab-pdf http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768 http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/4/140…

Design is about art though

Re: Designing a Bottle

#134

Post by staticassertion »

zichy wrote: post #129
staticassertion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Your argument is still "It's a bottle therefor stop making a big deal about it" - it's someone's job to care about it. They explain the problem they set out to solve, how they solved it, a background to how these problems are solved (I don't know shit about design, so the "less but better" reference is actually interesting). If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes en…

It's more about being pretentious. If you show me a nice program you coded, I'd say "that's cool". If you show me a nice program you coded and tell me that you've been inspired by John Backus, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, I'd say "yeah well it's still a program".

What if they actually were inspired by one of them? Why not give some background and context to a crowd that may not be familiar with various icons?

Re: Designing a Bottle

#135

Post by rpeden »

finkin1 wrote: post #33

This is a nice blog post - what's with all the hate? So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for? As a customer of Soylent, I appreciate that they are writing blog posts about their thought process. It feels nice to be communicated with. Also, I highly doubt a detailed blog post like this is going to convert many new customers - seems like it's mainly for existing ones. FYI, the new bottles…

It's an old problem. There's a neat book, Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, published by the EFF back in 1990. There's a quote from it[1] that comes to mind when I see people vehemently disagreeing online:

    Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the 
    immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon 
    think seem to exist to make you miserable.

    Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's 
    just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them. 
    Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving madmen. When this happens, 
    flames erupt.
And of course, Usenet was around long before this book was published. So now, when I see people being righteously indignant on HN or Reddit, I try to take it in stride. They're just carrying on the time honored internet flaming tradition. :)

[1] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_8.html

Re: Designing a Bottle

#136

Post by kristianc »

What is with this trend of making all products look identical?

Surely a product's design is meant to give some indication of what is in the product and what the product does?

This just looks like a completely generic bottle and could as easily be for a foodstuff or a cleaning agent.

I saw something similar the other day, a 'brandless' supermarket where everything is designed in a similarly minimalist way. It's infuriating.

http://designtaxi.com/news/394281/A-Fabulous-Brandless-Onlin...

Re: Designing a Bottle

#137

Post by farnsworth »

basseq wrote: post #121
vinchuco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A keurig type machine for soylent paper bags would be an interesting sight. Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.

I don't know how difficult it is to mix Soylent, but you can buy an automatic baby formula maker for $150-$200. Put water in the tank, power in the top, and boom: automatic mixing. I'm surprised an enterprising Soylent enthusiast hasn't hacked something up yet—particularly given their "early adopter" tech audience. It shouldn't be too much harder to add "pods" (powder containers) to that device. It might even make th…

Just combining water and powder doesn't give the right texture. In my experience, you have to use a blender, or it doesn't come out smooth. But when I use a blender, it still has a "frothy" texture that isn't quite as smooth as the stuff in the bottles they ship.

Re: Designing a Bottle

#138

Post by vinchuco »

mseebach wrote: post #115
vinchuco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A keurig type machine for soylent paper bags would be an interesting sight. Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.

> Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee. It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup. In what world was that ever a hard sell?

One with coffee filters

Re: Designing a Bottle

#140

Post by 7Z7 »

vinchuco wrote: post #138
mseebach wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee. It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup. In what world was that ever a hard sell?

One with coffee filters

Have you used a Keurig? Or Nespresso?
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