what are your industrial design favorites?

[Count Arthur]

From the rear that Peugot is pretty similar to the MGB:

 

[Propheticus]

Amazing are these:

We do have a watch thread here https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...atches-what-do-yall-have-on-your-wrists.6702/

While I do respect and sometimes marvel at the craftmanship needed to design and create such watches, I think they often fail bigtime on watch requirement no.1:
Being able to quickly read the time at a glance. In that respect many of these showpieces are not really great industrial designs.

 

[Pennyless Audiophile]

While I do respect and sometimes marvel at the craftmanship needed to design and create such watches, I think they often fail bigtime on watch requirement no.1:
Being able to quickly read the time at a glance. In that respect many of these showpieces are not really great industrial designs.

It is pure art, and the industrial part becomes only a tool at the service of beauty.

 

[fluufy]

Seen a bit of B&O in this thread, but not these. H9 third gen, showing a couple of years heavy usage. Same design as the original H9, and still one of best understated but lavish headphone designs. They don’t sound as good as they look unless you make a custom eq and run wavelet in android (there is no good preset for these). Superseded by H95 and HX, neither of which is as pretty - in fact the HX just looks like a H9 with tizzy hubcaps! Back to the drawing board…

 

[Propheticus]

I get aesthetics are part of industrial design. But in my opinion that's only one part.
These are very low volume (sometimes 1) pieces of art.
Industrial design is about mass produced/production series. It has to be aesthetically pleasing, usable and able to be produced economically.

Industrial design came up in the industrial revolution when we moved a way from handcrafted paradigm (each piece is unique) towards series production where every piece is identical as the designer intended.

So while I admire the art-piece watches, I think they're in the wrong thread.

 

[tomchris]

Richard Sapper's IBM ThinkPad series is a significant piece of mass produced, aesthetically pleasing industrial design.
Shown here is the ThinkPad 701C with its signature butterfly keyboard:

Richard Sapper also made the Tizio lamp for Artemide:

 

[Propheticus]

I remember being really impressed by the Magsafe connection on the White 13" Macbook my university professor bought us to participate in a 'test' if it would boost productivity/grades. (Which was nonsense of course, he just didn't want to get discounted on next year's budget and had to spend some surplus.)

In my opinion a really clever way to prevent laptops flying of tables by someone accidentally yanking the cord. It also made the laptop feel very mobile even when quickly topping up a charge, no hassle unplug and you're free of strings again.

(side note: the thermal design of that thing was a disaster by the way. The slightest load sustained for more than 5 seconds would mean the fan spun up and the laptop sounded like it wanted to take off...)

 

[JeffS7444]

Richard Sapper also made the Tizio lamp for Artemide:

How could I have forgotten the Tizio lamp? I have one sitting on the other end of the room! But my older unit with it's H1 quartz halogen car headlamp bulb is feeling dated: The light quality is good, but I haven't used it much in recent years due to the heat it emits. And while the design is great for bringing light to where it's needed, it does need some space. Maybe I should look into getting a mini LED Tizio.

 

[tomchris]

How could I have forgotten the Tizio lamp? I have one sitting on the other end of the room! But my older unit with it's H1 quartz halogen car headlamp bulb is feeling dated: The light quality is good, but I haven't used it much in recent years due to the heat it emits. And while the design is great for bringing light to where it's needed, it does need some space. Maybe I should look into getting a mini LED Tizio.

Maybe you could try to install a cooler H1 LED bulb instead of the 55W H1 halogen?

 

[q3cpma]

Richard Sapper's IBM ThinkPad series is a significant piece of mass produced, aesthetically pleasing industrial design.
Shown here is the ThinkPad 701C with its signature butterfly keyboard:

Good taste, I still have stash of x200(s) and old Latitudes, because I can't stand chiclet keyboards. But my favourite "laptop" of all time is definitely the classic Precision (M4600/4700/4800).

 

[JeffS7444]

Maybe you could try to install a cooler H1 LED bulb instead of the 55W H1 halogen?

So far I've had limited success: The LED bulb that I tried fit with only minor modification to the lamp, but brightness and color rendition have been disappointing. But LEDs with 90+ CRI do exist, and I'd like to try those.

 

[Wes]

The car that killed James Dean?

yes, here is the actual item

 

[mhardy6647]

I'd love to have a house built with such, refurbishing mine not so much....

We built this house (umm, more accurately, we had it built for us): our whole first ("main") floor has radiant heat, as do our bathrooms and our "mudroom" (does that need to be defined for this audience)... oh, and my hifi room, too.
They're a little complicated, and consequently a little scary -- but they're absolutely marvelous on a bitter cold New England night when one pads into the bathroom to take a... bath and the floor is warm underfoot.

We have had one mishap to date, involving a mouse gnawing into one of the PEX pipes that feeds the guest bathroom upstairs. Made a bit of a mess before we tracked it down, and (of course!) necessitated cutting a couple of holes in wall & ceiling to find and repair the lesion

If we had it to do all over again, I think I'd just do the ceramic-tiled floor rooms (i.e., the baths & mudroom) -- although actually my hifi room (with wall to wall carpeting) works quite well with the radiant heat.

 

[Harmonie]

From the rear that Peugot is pretty similar to the MGB:

That depends on the perspective you get from both sides of the channel

 

[Angsty]

I love the industrial design of the *inside* of a Sutherland phono amp. The outside is plebeian, but the inside is captivating. There is something about those cobalt blue circuit boards that photos don't seem to do justice. I've just stared at mine for several minutes after opening.

 

[Kling75]

This provides an excuse to expound endlessly on a topic of little interest to most here. That's just about my favorite thing to do

The notion that the Swiss think of Rolex as a watch for poseurs is rather overstated. It is entirely true that Rolexes have become the status symbols of the wealthy--a sort-of every day watch for those who have money to spend and don't mind that others know it. And it's true that what old Europeans might describe as nouveau riches might 1.) be poseurs, and 2.) be wearing a Rolex (or a Fauxlex).

But it is not true that Rolexes are unpopular with watch collectors, or that it is a brand for poseurs. The fact is that Rolexes are extremely well-made for their apparent functional purpose--durable, serviceable (far moreso than many boutique brands), and accurate (by the standards of mechanical watches). Those who run much higher-end companies often admire Rolex out loud. One such was amazed as to how Rolex sustained such quality and consistency so cheaply (this statement, by the way, predates the last decade of enormous collector-driven price increases). Rolex collectors have lost their minds, but that isn't the watch's fault.

It is true that collectors generally dislike Hublot, for reasons I don't fully understand but certainly related to the way they are marketed. Panerai fits in the same category. Both are enormously popular with just the sorts of people who would buy a Rolex but want something different.

Watch nuts tend to avoid brands that are popular with regular people, for reasons that are frankly not complimentary.

By the way, I don't own an Audemars-Piguet or a Patek-Philippe (or a Rolex), but I do own watches from Girard-Perregaux, Ulysse Nardin, Ebel, Zenith, JLC, Concord, Heuer, Zodiac, Seiko, Movado, Yema, Marathon, Hamilton, Bulova, a few microbrands and one-offs, and probably another half a dozen I've forgotten. All of them were made for those who, in part, were posing. Yes, even the Seiko Black Monster diver, which is hardly more expensive than a G-Shock. And a G-Shock is certainly not styled the way it is because their owners just want to tell time on their wrist.

Here's a fun fact: There were several ways in which family watch-company owners tried to perpetuate their companies beyond their own lives. Jacques-David LeCoultre (grandson of the founder) established a family holding company (SAPIC) to carry on the ownership after his death. That worked for about 20 years, until Henry Leuba rescued a failing Roger LeCoultre and reformed the holding company (as SAPHIR) to fight off a takeover attempt from the previous manager, who parted company, taking with him Vacheron Constantin (one of the Trinity), which before the 60's was owned by SAPIC. They hung on until Gunther Blumlein came along with VDO backing.

Zodiac did not survive its third generation, and Rene Ariste sold out to Dixi Machine (Paul Castella) in the late 70's. Nothing happened with them through several owners until Fossil decided to establish their premium brands as fully Swiss. Zodiac, which they had bought in 2001, was one of those, and it is now surprisingly like it was back in the day. Another fun fact: Tom Kartsotis, the founder of Fossil and a classmate of mine, though I didn't know him, now owns Shinola.

Zenith Watch Company established a corporation to take over after the founder's death, and was owned by the banks until Dixi Machine bought them, too, also in the late 70's (after a decade-long partnership with Movado that was owned by the coincidentally names Zenith Electronics during part of that period). They sold Zenith to Louis Vuitton in 1999, who still owns it.

Movado was an old Swiss company that Dixi didn't want when it bought the Zenith-Movado holding company. They sold the Movado part to a Cuban-American who renamed his company from the North American Watch Company to the Movado Group. Gerry Grinberg's son Efraim is the CEO of this publicly traded company based in New Jersey, but the watch-making parts for their premium brands (including Movado) are all Swiss and based in the same town as Rolex's movement manufacture (and also Omega's HQ): Biel/Bienne.

Patek Philippe was bought by their American sales agency in the late 20's, and the Sterns still own it. Audemars-Piguet is one of the few companies still owned by their founding families.

Now, to Rolex, the purpose of all this: Hans Wilsdorf also wanted a way to perpetuate his company, so he created a non-profit foundation. Wilsdorf only own a portion of Rolex, but he had already bought out the descendants of his original partner's family (Davis). But he did not own the movement factory itself--that was owned by Aegler, who made movements for a time also for Gruen. Rolex and Aegler were joined at the hip, and each owned chunks of the other's company. But Rolex (aka Wilsdorf Foundation) did not fully own Aegler until 2006, notwithstanding that Aegler's buildings in Biel/Bienne had Rolex signs on their roofs for half a century. The two Rolex factories plus their HQ in Geneva make cases and perform final assembly. So, the portion of Rolex owned by the Wilsdorf Foundation is ultimately non-profit, but of course, the employees and trustees of the foundation work for their salaries. But it means that Rolex net profits have done a lot of interesting charitable things over the last half century or so.

In terms of which strategy works for perpetuating a company most successfully, Wilsdorf's business model seems to have ruled the day. Only Omega and Cartier are even on the same planet of production volume for "fine" watches at that general price point.

I don't own a Rolex because I gravitate to watches that are unique buying opportunities, and Rolexes are almost never that. And I'm with Frank in not really liking the fluted bezel of the traditional Datejust. But I would not turn down a Submariner Deep Sea, GMT Master II, or Daytona, should any of you decide to give me one.

Rick "into watch company history at least as much as the watches themselves" Denney

Thanks a lot for this information.

After working 15 years in Assistant Management Positions in Zurich / Zug / Geneva, I assure you wearing Rolex is by no means a career booster. This may work in middle managemant. In Top Positions in Banking and Wealth Management etc. the Brand is a no go. These Guys are no collectors what so ever, but like in American Psycho, the Business Cards, these guys like to show their JAEGER-LECOULTRE etc.

In this sphere they buy complete collections of rare Watches with their anual Bonus...it is disgusting to watch.

 

[UniPolar]

.In this sphere they buy complete collections of rare Watches with their anual Bonus...it is disgusting to watch.

Now that ,is a funny play on words..

 

[VMAT4]

Could have been post #47

 

[Harmonie]

Could have been post #47

The Avanti has been posted and mentioned several times on the weird car's thread.
But why post #47 ?

 

[VMAT4]

The Avanti has been posted and mentioned several times on the weird car's thread.
But why post #47 ?

Post #46 is the 1953 Studebaker Coup. BTW what's weird about the Avanti?