Whipsaw

Seeking Truth in Design

By: Angie Heile

Whipsaw’s goal is to enable a product to express itself pleasingly and effectively. “A product is an expression of a truth,” Harden says. “We’re seeking truths.”

The San Jose-based industrial design company Whipsaw, Inc. has made products ranging from a robotic protein analyzer to a surveyors’ GPS receiver to a point-and-shoot camera shaped like a nautilus shell. It specializes in solving human factors problems at all points of product development, from research and concepts to engineering and prototyping to branding and packaging. It also specializes in seeking truths.

Seeking what? Dan Harden, the company’s founder, principal, and lead designer, is as deeply interested in fine art as in product design. He handpainted all the floors of his company’s offices in an abstract expressionist style that complements his industrial design. When creating a product, his vision is neither decorative nor utilitarian: it is philosophical and, above all, expressive. Whipsaw’s job is to enable a product to express itself pleasingly and effectively. A well-designed product conveys its own functionality, its own purpose, its own beauty, and thereby its own value. “A product is an expression of a truth,” he explains. “We’re seeking truths.”

The main hindrance to the expression of a product’s truth is the set of human factors problems encountered by its user. Simplifying the product is the first step toward solving these problems. The next step is accommodating the subjectivity of human experience, in which, the placebo effect is as significant as physical reality. “People think human factors are about ergonomics, like is my keyboard at a certain height? But most human factors are in the head. Does my chair look comfortable?” Harden gestures toward an Acer notebook computer that Whipsaw designed with a focus on sound quality, and notes that after optimizing the sound as much as possible, designers can still do more. “Bass is non-directional, but when the speakers are facing you, you feel like the sound is better.”

Jennifer Morrill came to Whipsaw with a set of human factors problems. She was marketing a breastshaped baby bottle for finicky babies who refused traditional bottles. The original design, patented by her late father, was hailed as innovative, but struggled in the market. Moms found it leaky, unwieldy, and hard to clean; babies had issues with the mouthpiece; onlookers snickered at the nippled-dome shape. Harden researched standard baby bottle design, found that it hadn’t changed much in 50 years, and decided the breastshaped bottle was a good starting place for an update.

Whipsaw’s redesigned bottle, the Adiri Natural Nurser, is a study in balance. Its sleek shape looks modern and hip rather than prosthetic (although the “baby end” is still so anatomically correct that one magazine described it as “the Real Doll of baby bottles”). Instead of having a removable top, the bottle is filled from the back, where it is repressurized by a leakproof valve to prevent the baby from sucking air. The polycarbonate- free hard plastic chamber that holds the milk is co-molded with a material soft and comfortable enough to convince stubborn breastfeeders to take the bait.

The Adiri bottle may cost ten times more than the standard variety, but delighted parents sing its praises in blogs and reviews across the Internet. “I panicked and saw the next couple years of date nights and ‘me’ time floating away to that place where my sleep and my clean house ran off to as well,” reported one mother whose baby had rejected various other bottles. “But then a shining light in the shape of a boob (and it wasn’t mine) entered our lives, and now baby and I are happy.”

Another client came to Whipsaw with the basic technology for a new retina scanner. “He had all this technology piled on the table, on fourby-
eight sheets of plywood,” Harden recalls. The scanner would enable ophthalmologists to get very high-resolution 3D images of the retina in less than one second, with detail down to 5 microns, in a completely safe and painless procedure.

Harden asked the client three questions: What can we get rid of? What can’t we get rid of? What’s the essence of what makes this work? After reducing the device to its essentials, Whipsaw packaged it to inspire confidence in doctors—and prevent fear in patients. “People are afraid of going to the doctor, and they’re afraid of being probed and squeezed and touched by all these robots,” says Harden.

The result was compact, easy-toadjust, and joystick-controlled. When Harden demonstrated the product to doctors, “They couldn’t believe it,” he
says. “I knew it would be a hit because I’d never before heard a group of ophthalmologists actually giggle.”

Whipsaw’s design approach contends that every object, even the most seemingly staid—a baby bottle, a medical diagnostic tool—is, through its use by humans, already imbued with feeling. The design needs to manage the user experience to evoke the right emotions. The trick is not just to conceal the complexity of the technology inside but also to reveal the strengths of the product by stripping away any obstacle to its ease of use. “Then,” says Harden, “you add something: a surprise that makes people smile.”

Normally, when designers think of usability, we think of design that is convenient, not confusing or frustrating: in a word, invisible. But at Whipsaw, a truly usable product must provide not just convenience, but delight. “We want to offer something much more meaningful than just the consumption of this product,” he explains. “I was just at the Consumer Electronics Show and 90% of the stuff there is junk. Too many features, too many gadgets. You just don’t need it.” Convenience, after all, is only a means, not an end. Why make something unless it inspires joy?