Is a design ultimately successful if the initial idea kind of sucks, but it’s implemented unusually well? Does effort spent later in the process naturally fill the space left by a questionable starting point? What effect does a combination of irresponsible design at the outset and high quality in later stages have on how we feel about a designed object?
Complications
This week I took apart a Beomaster 1600, a solid-state amplifier from 1980 with a strange control system. There are two rubber tank treads, one on each end of the inclined control panel. The aluminum strip along the bottom of the panel surface is divided into uniform buttons, grouped into a left cluster for tone controls and a right cluster for input selection and radio tuning.
The idea is that to adjust something (volume, balance, radio frequency) you push that button on the bottom strip and “scroll” the tank tread on that side of the device up and down.
How does the button link and unlink its corresponding control with the central drive shaft turned by the tank tread? Mechanically, this works like a clutch in an automotive transmission. Holding down a button pushes a plastic disc fixed to the tank tread-controlled drive shaft against a plastic disc linked to the potentiometer controlling the function written on the button. These discs have concentric ridges, giving them some friction when pressed against something.
This friction interaction takes place inside a multi-part, tiny, meticulously molded acrylic enclosure. The drive shaft holds a skewer of these pairs of fixed and non-fixed discs. When you look at the teeth on these discs, it seems like they’re meant to interlock. But, they’re actually sandwiching a very thin rubber washer.
These washers seem like they might have been a later addition to the initial design of cleanly interlocking teeth. I can imagine plenty of reasons why it would work better, from softening the feel of the button to better keeping the inactive discs apart.
But, these rubber washers had dried out over time, giving them less surface friction thus causing the entire mechanism to fail. Anyone in a position to be working on these products knows that this would happen to this material after a certain time.
Going back to the experience of using this device: it feels like controlling a spaceship, pretty abstract and smooth for something entirely mechanical.
Perhaps uniquely among stereo receivers before or since, it takes two hands to operate absolutely any control.
Are engineers nostalgic?
I always took issue with “planned obsolescence” as it’s popularly understood outside design and manufacturing. When I was studying in an industrial design program I used to joke that I was looking forward to the day in third year where the RAND corporation would come in and show us how it was done. We all know this isn’t how it works, it’s tradeoffs of cost informed by lots of culturally internalized notions maybe just as much as an official list of minimum qualities the object has to fulfill.
Maybe I’ll hear from engineers about this but I wonder if there’s some sort of a consensus across the discipline of the point where the primary objective switched from quality improvement to cost reduction. One can’t exist without another, but was there a sweeping change in primacy that is felt in a folk way as well as materially? For instance, car people talk about this happening at Porsche and Mercedes in the 90s — the very introduction of the idea of building to a budget rather than to a standard being introduced and irreversibly changing the gestalt of the product. There are reports of Apple design meetings in the last few years where designers are shocked to be confronted, for the first time, with cost considerations to counterbalance their ambitions. Mihai Nadin, a guest lecturer at the Design Academy when I was in third year, said that Apple used to be the only real design company in the world. I think it’s clear that it isn’t, at least anymore, and maybe the insulation from opposing pressures was part of what made it true at the time.
But, I don’t know anyone who would honestly say that confrontation with reality doesn’t improve a design.
Close enough
Earlier this week I was looking at a Beogram 4002 turntable (1975) with a snapped belt on the motor control for the tonearm. Without this belt, the turntable could do absolutely nothing: light up and spin, make a grinding noise for a second, and shut off again. I fixed it for now with a desk-drawer rubber band, but it reminded me that most turntables don’t even require a motor for this part. Of course if there’s no mechanism, there’s no potential for it to fail.
But, this added motor mechanism allows the tonearm to travel sideways instead of pivoting. There is something fundamentally sound about the principle of this tangential tonearm design — the needle is always exactly in line with the record groove, and that seems like it should give more consistent playback. (I don’t know how real a problem this actually is.)
So between the Beomaster 1600 amplifier and the Beogram 4002 turntable, both had rubber pieces worn out. Neither was standard — the rubber washers for the amplifier were less than .5mm thick, whereas hardware store ones of the same diameter were 2mm thick. The belt for the turntable tonearm motor had a triangular profile.
I don’t have any punches or thin rubber on hand, so I just shaved down the thickness of the washers with a scalpel. This worked fine, and it was useful to be able to microadjust the thickness of each washer to account for the difference in wear on each of the amplifier’s clutch mechanisms. Meanwhile the normal rubber band conformed to the profile of the pulleys almost automatically: it turned 45 degrees.
The unbreakable immaterial
Italian plastic from 1960–1980 influenced by utopian thinking often shows tragically flawed ideas executed with a seductive level of quality and confidence. Louise and I have somehow ended up with quite a lot of this stuff that has now experienced the ravages of half a century. This design entices through its conviction that it is frozen in time.
“It won't age or break, you can throw it out the window, leave it outside, put it under water, take it to the North Pole or the desert: it will always be like new.”
If you really bought into this at the time, it made sense to not get bogged down in durability concerns. A magic material, futuristic enough to just float above it all, won’t get cracked, scratched, yellowed, or melted because it is already dematerialized.
Even though it seems like there were no sceptics in the room at the conception of these objects, there is often great care given to every subsequent implementation detail. The play of light on surfaces, placement of part lines, interlocking pieces, precise edges, weight and thickness. But once the results of the ideology that initiated the whole thing lead to a fundamental failure, all these details change from additive to compromising, giving away the game. It doesn’t feel right that this attention to detail is stuck on the sinking ship with the fundamental flaw.
As a counterexample Dieter Rams was way more cautious about plastic in the earlier part of this same period. The Combiscope projector has the thickest ABS walls I’ve ever seen on an electronic product. The Vitsoe side tables are finished like lacquered wood. The stacking stool system, according to Klaus Klemp, gathers surface moss in the garden until it looks like stone. But Rams and his team at Braun eventually tried immersion in the mass delusion with things like their fragile plastic stereo equipment of the 70s.
More recently Apple was, for a long time, so convincing in its precision that a lot of questionable ideas could be forgiven by a lot of people. A transcendent focus on execution makes the unproven idea inarguable and daring, until it’s taken too far and becomes a defensive monolith. I think Apple’s ability to “get away with it” has faded since at least 2020 but I’ll have to go into more detail on that later.
The unbroken nothing
Villi, my grandfather on my mom’s side, drove a Volvo 240 because it had the least amount of mess under the hood. But it took me a while to get back to this attitude. When we first get interested in design, virtuosic solutions to self-imposed problems are a lot of fun and reflect an attitude that feels capable of instituting real change.
A lecture at CIVA by Beatriz Colomina about le Corbusier and Eileen Gray really opened my eyes to the great man’s lifelong strategy of denying reality, and in David Pascoe’s Airspace there is more about how he approached technological development in this way. Told that his plans for airstrips either between high-rises or on top of them were unrealistic because the planes could not land precisely enough, Charles-Édouard insisted that there was no problem with his design, only that aeronautics were not yet developed enough. As he saw it, it was the opposite problem of what I’ve been discussing — good design let down by lazy engineering. Sometimes it feels good to be swept up in the moment.