For a long time the world has seen a proliferation of products designed to make our daily lives easier. The driving force behind this is consumer demand.

The factors behind modern product design are as varied as they are numerous. While the flashing episodic genius of the truly innovative designer may rank prominently in history, in its proper perspective such inventiveness is often but a function of the true force behind product change – consumer demand. And the pace at which consumer demand spurs product evolution is commonly dictated by factors firmly rooted in technology.
Take the humble bicycle. Today more than a billion bicycles and other pedal cycles traverse the globe’s streets, dusty deserts and mud-clogged trails; 160 years ago, there were none. What may have been the world’s first pedal-powered cycle was built in Scotland in 1840 by blacksmith and part-time inventor Kirkpatrick Macmillan. Macmillan had grown tired of his Hobby Horse, a popular two-wheeled contraption propelled by pushing at the ground with heavily booted feet. He set himself the task of devising and building his own “feet up” propulsion method, and contrived a pedal-drive system that propelled the rear wheel by way of long cranks reminiscent of the era’s railway engines.
Last year I had the pleasure of photographing a replica of Macmillan’s “velocipede” at his former workplace, the Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfries-shire. I had the idea of contrasting the ageing wood-and-iron replica with a USD 5,000 carbon-fibre, full-suspension, disk-braked top-of-the-line mountain bike. When the two machines sat side by side, I found they were more similar than different. If there is an ideal formula for the bicycle, Macmillan got pretty close to it on the very first attempt.
The present-day full-suspension mountain bikes represent an achievement at the foremost edge of cutting-edge technology. Full suspension is fast becoming the norm on mountain bikes because, says Paul Smith of Mountain Biking UK magazine, “Without the application of suspension, the mountain bike industry would be missing a vital injection of market demand.” It’s a prime example of demand spawning design.
Early mountain bike suspension, explains Smith, was borrowed from the motorcycle world.
This led to unnecessary over-engineering, the long-term solution to which has been a whole breed of systems with technology specific to the mountain bike to make it strong, functional and extremely lightweight.
“A bicycle is essentially five points in the right place,” says Smith. “The wheel axles, seat, cranks and head tube. So long as they are in the right place and at the correct angles, it will function well as a bicycle. How the five points are interconnected is only limited by material technology and certain design requirements.”
Which makes the modern mountain bike is a unique blend of consumer demand specifics directly addressed by technological know-how. And with mountain biking generating nearly USD 1 billion annually in the US alone, you can expect techno-logical and design innovations to continue to play leading roles in drafting the off-road bicycle of tomorrow. Kirkpatrick Macmillan would be impressed.

Organic work spaces
In another design sphere, that of office furniture, technology takes a different role. Instead of technology being called upon to achieve desired design specs, office equipment technology is the primary force behind design change in office furniture products.
“The single biggest influence upon office furniture design today,” says Nick Lyons, “is the ever-changing technology of modern electronic office equipment.” Gone the way of the dinosaur are the open-plan offices of the 1970s, unbroken lines of desks butted side-on and sharing communal typewriters.
Today’s office must face up to the needs of the modern office worker, which means space for computers and monitors and other peripherals – and provision for kilometres of underfloor electrical wiring.
“IT (information technology) budgets are constantly growing year on year,” says Lyons, who is head of sales in Scotland for Georgeson Workplace, a large dealer of office furnishings for the Steelcase office furniture group. “Since technology makes things smaller, desks today must be more mobile, more flexible.” If the industry buzzword of the 1980s was “modularity,” today’s stock phrase is “inherent flexibility.” Often this takes the shape of “organic” static core workstation units combined with adaptable, mobile furniture elements that can easily be moved to suit the occasion.
What else influences office furniture design? “Real estate prices,” says Lyons. As an overhead, real estate investment is often a company’s second-largest outlay after staff, and because the price of office space directly affects the workspace available, its influence upon office design constraints is direct and unavoidable.
Georgeson Workplace has been heavily involved in the laying out of “call centres,” office workplaces set up for telephone marketing. These have suffered a great deal of bad press for supposedly “sweatshop” or “battery chicken” work conditions. This is not lost on the employers – all the more so since research has shown that office employees rank work environment as the third-most important aspect of a new job (after salary and location).
So it is that corporations are paying attention to designers and employees. Warm and cosy interior decoration and pastel colours are “in,” and office layouts incorporate “break-out” areas where workers can escape their desks, enjoy refreshment and relax amidst comfortable furnishings in eye-pleasing colours. All of which adds up to improved job satisfaction, increased productivity and, most important from the corporate perspective, higher rates of staff retention.

Freedom from allergens
Designs of bicycles and office furniture are taking on new lives, setting off in exciting new directions.
So is another everyday item – the vacuum cleaner. Today, one of the drivers in vacuum cleaner design is so small it’s almost, but not quite, intangible. In Britain, 40 percent of people suffer from allergies, many of which originate from the country’s 6.6 million pet dogs and 7.7 million pet cats.
Little wonder, then, that the successful capture and containment of dust mites and allergens are currently the crucial factor in vacuum cleaner design. In fact, in the UK, leading manufacturers pay GBP 10,000 (USD 15,000) to the British Allergy Foundation (BAF) for each model of cleaner to be rigorously tested and, they hope, BAF approved. In an allergen-conscious consumer market, BAF approval carries considerable weight.
“We in fact work very closely with manufacturers,” says BAF Deputy Chief Executive Carol Peek. She explains that the tests cover not only a machine’s ability to pick up allergens and dust mites from carpets and soft furnishings, but its ability to avoid blowing them back out in the form of exhaust gases. The last key consideration is the safe disposal of waste: A machine that successfully ingests allergens is not of much use if, when it is being emptied, it throws them back in the allergy sufferer’s face.
Consumer expectations. Fashion. Computer technology. Job satisfaction. And dust mites.
Unlikely bedfellows, perhaps – but they are all doing their bit to drive product design forward.

Ron McMillan
a technology journalist based in Scotland
photos Ron McMillan