Smartphone Time Warp

Smartphone Time Warp: What Inspired the Retro Handset

Back in 2005, Hulger officially launched its first phone. Previously a hard-to-get-hold-off cult product, ten thousand P*Phones were sold during the original model’s first year on the market.

Since then, Hulger has gone from strength to strength, expanding its range of designer vintage-inspired mobile and VoIP phones and handsets to the Plumen, an energy-saving light bulb.

Mashable spoke with award-winning designer Nicolas Roope, the founder and creative director of Hulger who came up with the initial concepts of all the company’s products, in order to find out more about the fascinating design process behind them.

Q&A with Nicolas Roope, Founder, Hulger

Do you have a “sculptural” approach to product design, or do you draw concepts first?

With the Hulger phones, I used to keep a sketch book of ideas; with the Plumen work I used to carry around a packet of pipe cleaners to make quick 3D sketches. When we started working on the final Plumen 001 design phase, we started with a photo I’d taken on my phone of a pipe cleaner sketch I’d banged together late one night on a trip to New York.

Clearly the inspiration for the P*Phone was vintage telephones. What do you think is so satisfying about that style of handset, and what made you want to update it for the digital age?

In the beginning, when things like radios and TVs started coming into our living spaces, they adopted the visual language of furniture to make it fit in harmoniously. Telephones were treated almost like furniture as well, and their forms weren’t just designed with pure function in mind. Designers like Henry Dreyfuss created beautiful, iconic sculptural masterpieces out of the humdrum telephone.

Then suddenly in the ’80s “hi-tech” became the defining movement in the design of technology. Tech shouldn’t fit in, it should feel like some alien craft has just landed in your front room with as many flashing lights and buttons as possible. Hi-tech was aspirational and needed a language all its own. The next thirty years saw that language getting sleeker, blacker, boxier, smaller — and with every step became a little bit more boring, a little bit more sobering and flat.

So by the start of the Noughties, we had tiny black, sleek phones full of flashing lights, buttons and functions we didn’t need. It was time to look back for inspiration and to put a substantial and sculpted handset back in people’s hands again.

What do you see as potential future trends for technological product design?

I think there are a number of forces at play that will move things in a completely new direction. One of the biggest is the separation of function and control. Why invest in expensive proprietary physical interface and interaction design and I.A. when you could just let people control devices through their smartphones, iPods, etc. via the LAN?

It’s so much easier to deliver complex interactions through a soft interface like a smartphone because everything can be dynamic — you don’t have physical buttons that can only have one function. You have the added advantages of being able to update the software remotely as well as act on devices from wherever you are. Sounds a bit futuristic, but all this stuff is arriving right now.

We’re doing some R&D around light-bulb control at the moment that we’re really excited about, as lighting is such an obvious application for wireless control systems via the smartphone. Add to this the opportunity to take location or biometric data to automatically trigger device events, for instance, as you’re about to arrive home (switch your lights and heating on), you don’t even need to consciously activate anything. These are pretty significant leaps forward, and the consequences for product design, let alone interior design and architecture, are significant.

In fact, I’ll go a step further and say I think we’re going to see a golden age of design over the next few decades.

The result of these changes means that devices will no longer need to present loads of interface elements, which suddenly liberates them to be something else — something more interesting, playful, beautiful, spectacular or whatever.

I also think that as our love affair with that clichéd hi-tech aesthetic wanes, we’ll see these smarter devices starting to find a new vernacular. We created a one-off PIP*Phone out of wood in 2006, and ever since we’ve seen more and more wood used in tech products and have observed how excited people have been about it and other traditional materials like brass, ceramics and concrete.

While a lot of this activity has been pretty niche, I think it’s still blowing out to the mainstream pretty rapidly. I love the idea of tech made out of warm and textured, sustainable materials, in shapes and forms that operate more like art and sculpture than the highly engineered machines of perfection we’re used to.

The other likely tendency and cause of connectedness will be invisibility. If you don’t need to interact with the device directly, do you need to see it at all? If it needs to be visible it should be celebrated — if not, why show it at all? The consequence of this can be a streamlining and de-cluttering of interior spaces, which in turn opens up new possibilities for designers.

You have collaborated with Sebastien Noel, Kam Young and Samuel Wilkinson. What are the challenges and joys of working with another designer?

We work with designers on all our products. That’s why we call it Hulger and not use my name — there’s always a whole team involved. Our products represent all kinds of collaborations with different people. I remember working with some textile designers to get the slightly random array of holes in the P*Phone mouthpiece distributed just right, and working with luxury leather designer Bill Amberg on some leather and exotic-skin clad phones as just two examples.

I find it easy working with designers because I really drive the conceptual side of things and leave space for the designers we’re working with to finesse the look, form and materials. Collaboration is really fun when you leave the space to surprise each other.

Considering your creations have a function, have you ever had to compromise on aesthetics due to technological limitations?

“Is it such a surprise that rather than going for undifferentiated, generic things, [people] do in fact crave the extraordinary and iconic?”

One of the joys of creating such super-simple things is making very few trade-offs. If you need to house 50 buttons on a product, you’ve got serious usability issues to solve, which of course become the defining brief. If you’re mounting one button, you can afford to be much more playful and let the aesthetic choices drive the decisions.

It’s said you “force a blurring of boundaries between art and design and between creativity, technology and business.” How does this apply to the Hulger product range?

As well as product design, I have worked with the web since 1995, when I was part of a digital art group making CD-Roms and early Shockwave experiments. Having my head in the Internet makes me see the world in a very different way. So when the phone idea popped into my head, it was instinctive to share the idea and get it out there to see what people made of it.

Traditional product development is secretive and closed, and focus groups are your litmus tests for a product’s potential. This old approach is as expensive as it is risky, because focus groups are a very blunt instrument. Our approach understood that if people saw and liked what we did, it would give us confidence to invest in and develop new products. And we knew that if people came on that journey right from the start, they might not only buy the products themselves but also would become powerful advocates and fans of the brand. If Kickstarterwas around in 2002, we would certainly have been on there because it works on precisely those principles. It would have made our lives a whole lot easier too!

This new way of seeing things, and the new negotiation with fans and customers, has created an opportunity for our business — a product that would formally have died or been corrupted by focus groups and testing became stronger through people’s enthusiasm for what we were doing. And these people were all over the world tuning in to our ideas led naturally to us launching products in 25 different countries. This was an unfunded company of two people, so I hope you can appreciate how this was quite unusual.

What I’m really saying in summary is we could make a different kind of niche physical product that could not have existed before the web.

You mentioned Kickstarter. Does it excite you as a platform for product design?

I love Kickstarter for so many reasons. I think it will change product design forever because it will remove the speculation associated with product development. When you have to second-guess whether people will like things or not, the tendency will always be to dilute ideas and designs, to push them to be more ordinary in order to appeal to a wider audience.

This has been the eternal struggle for creative people and designers who want to push things towards the unique but are always being ushered back towards the ordinary. Kickstarter unlocks this conundrum, allowing the buyer to define the design themselves — and hey, is it such a surprise that rather than going for undifferentiated, generic things, they do in fact crave the extraordinary and iconic?

It’s great for buyers who get something really cool and special, it’s great for designers because they get to get sharper, cooler ideas out in to the world, and of course it’s great for the Kickstarter folks as they get some hefty checks out of these interactions. This is going to be a massive wake-up call to corporations, which will quickly see demand for the products evolved through their convoluted processes drop as customers wake up to something much more exciting.

Everyone really gets how the web has evolved digital interactions across the network itself, but I think people often miss how many of these changes are played back into the physical world. The incredible things that we’ll be able to own over coming years will be a lot more to do with the network than any focus group.

Finally, do you have any advice for aspiring product designers?

My advice to any creative person would be to find your groove, whatever it is. And don’t waste your life trying to please people: We all have something really unique to offer, and discovering that is key to creating something extraordinary.