… In the case of my active desk search, I am fortunate. One of the chief “objects” of my invention is to permit users to reposition the desk height quickly and easily so they can avoid postural fixity, which causes musculoskeletal stress. The patents I review indicate that many other inventors have developed adjustable desks, but in every case the movement mechanisms they employ are slow, complicated, and expensive. My desk has an adjustment mechanism that suffers from none of these deficiencies.
Whether or not a patent examiner would share Edelson’s judgment that his desk-adjusting mechanism would work faster, operate more simply, and be more economical to manufacture than those in existing patents would have to wait for the patenting process to proceed. However, since Edelson believed that his desk “also offers other novel and useful features,” he was optimistic that he would “have a good chance to obtain a valuable new patent.”
The potential value of a patent is not often far from the minds of inventors; nor is its cost. In addition to the expense of traveling to the Patent Office or hiring a Washington-based patent agent to search the files for prior art, there are the filing and other costs, which can amount to over $500 for an individual and about twice that for a large corporation. A patent search can be arduous, with or without an adjustable desk, for the incremental improvements in artifacts and processes recorded in the United States alone have given rise to five million patents through 1990. There are movements to computerize the files, but searching must still be done within about seventy thousand classes and subclasses. U.S. patent information is now being made more and more accessible by computer, but in late 1990 it required two compact discs to cover a single week of patents as they were issued. Nine discs were needed to contain the abstracts alone of all the patents issued in Japan during the 1980s. The Patent Office is working to have all U.S. patents available on optical discs, but the process is progressing slowly. Even if computerized, the patent files will be cumbersome to search, for a single subclass could occupy about a thousand compact discs.
Should Nathan Edelson gain a patent for his “active desk,” that in itself will not prevent a similar adjustable desk from being made someday. What drives inventors and corporations to carry out laborious patent searches and to bother at all with the details of filing an application and seeing it through the seemingly arcane process is the legal right to sue for infringement. Though some individuals go through the patenting process merely to experience it and to be able to enjoy the achievement of owning a patent, most patents are taken out for their potential economic rather than intellectual value. If, for example, the Edelson Desk does someday become the office desk of choice, there would no doubt be a host of imitators offering look-alikes at lower prices. They would be able to do so because, in addition to saving on research-and-development costs, they might not use as heavy a piece of wood for the top, as thick a piece of Formica for the surface, or as attractive a piece of trim for the edges. The other desks might have a slightly different slant, but they might look close enough to the Edelson Desk (perhaps as seen on TV?) to capture a sizable part of the market.
Edelson, in the meantime, might have just completed a new factory, whose output he has difficulty selling. For all the thought and time he had put into inventing and bringing to market a good solid adjustable desk, perhaps, after some rough starts that required him to seek further capital and to modify his design, he might be left holding an empty cash bag. If he could, however, argue in court that one or more claims in his patent were infringed upon, then he might at least recover something for his efforts. If, on the other hand, in trying to make a less expensive desk than Edelson’s, his competitor had come up with a functionally superior and novel design that did something Edelson’s desk failed to do, then Edelson would have lost a battle but the world would have won a new form.
The potential value of a patented invention was demonstrated late in 1990, when one inventor won a $10-million settlement against an automobile manufacturer he had approached years earlier with a new idea for windshield wipers. Robert Kearns was a professor at Wayne State University when he reflected upon the failure of existing windshield wipers to work effectively in light rain and drizzle. The wipers had repeatedly to be turned on and off if the driver did not want to be annoyed by the rubbing and streaking as the blades passed over just a few drops of water on each swipe. For some drivers the major annoyance was the distracting noise of the stick-and-slip action, while for others it was the thought of wearing out blades unnecessarily. Some drivers may even have been oblivious to the inefficiency of the wipers in a light rain, and many may simply have accepted the need to flip them on and off as just the way things worked.
Kearns not only noticed the failure of an existing thing to work effectively under all conditions but figured out a way to solve the problem. He invented a mechanism that would allow a variety of settings to sweep the blades across the windshield intermittently, clearing the drops of water only after enough had accumulated for the rubber to work smoothly but before they got too dense to see through safely. The inventor installed his device on his Ford and drove it to the auto manufacturer in Detroit, where engineers seemed immediately to see the advantages of his improvement and asked questions about it. Kearns took their interest as an indication that Ford would buy his invention, and so he expected to be rewarded for his ingenuity.
But when Ford began to install intermittent wipers on its cars without offering Kearns any compensation, he sued for patent infringement. The company’s defense was that the idea for such wipers was conceived before a patent was issued to Kearns, and so no infringement had occurred. But, following twelve years of litigation in the courts, Ford agreed to pay the patent holder a settlement, which after legal fees amounted to a royalty of thirty-three cents for every one of the twenty million Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys that had been manufactured with intermittent windshield wipers. Legal battles with nineteen other automobile manufacturers promised to add to Kearns’s ultimate profit from his invention.
Though the more complicated windshield wipers certainly have not made automobiles any less expensive, they have provided such a clear advantage by eliminating some failings of the older, continuously running devices that the overall operation of the automobile is safer and more effective. The visual and aural experience of driving a car through a light rain has certainly been altered, and in a broad sense the car itself and the traffic patterns of which it is a part work more efficiently. And now windshield wipers themselves, as well as their blades, are certainly used more frugally.
13
When Good Is Better Than Best
Just as investors speculate on the future price of oil and other commodities, so do entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporations speculate on the future of new designs. And just as oil prices can depend upon a host of cultural and political factors well beyond the seemingly simple rules of supply and demand, so can the acceptance or rejection of a new or even a modified artifact depend upon much more than how well or poorly its form suits, let alone follows, its function. Indeed, the investor in design is ill served by an adviser who looks too narrowly at technical indicators to prognosticate performance in the marketplace. Case study after case study warns us that no design is sacred and that form follows where the future leads.
As examples like the aluminum can and plastic bottle make so clear, it is not only consumer products proper but also the design of their packaging that can be subject to the times. In the early 1970s, the McDonald’s Corporation was encircling its Big Mac in a paper collar, wrapping it in paper and foil, and then inserting all of this in a red box. Such an elaborate package, though hardly an organic form following from any single function, was developed to meet the several functions of getting an elaborate hamburger from behind the counter to the customer’s mouth without its looking or feeling like a cold, soggy mess, at least before the first bite. The paper collar kept the double-decker Big Mac from being skewed or squashed in all the wrapping and handli
ng, the paper absorbed excess grease and thus prevented unsightly drips, the foil not only kept the hamburger from becoming cold and dried out but also covered any grease spots on the paper and thus prevented any unsightly appearance from causing Big Mac purchasers to lose their appetites. Finally, the box kept the wrapping from coming undone and gave the Big Mac a special gloss to accompany its special sauce. Even if it was effective, the elaborate packaging took considerable time to assemble and a not inconsiderable amount of time to open. In short, the medium failed to convey the proper message for a fast-food restaurant.
In 1975 McDonald’s introduced a new packaging design that seemed to remove all the failings of the old. Each Big Mac was to be packed in a polystyrene “clamshell,” an ingenious device made from foamed petroleum products that enabled the hamburger to be packaged in a single motion in a single container that could be opened just as quickly and easily by the consumer. As a bonus feature, customers found that the opened lid of the clamshell provided a convenient bowl for French fries. Moreover, the box evoked the faux-mansard roofs of the McDonald’s restaurants and seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the fast-food chain.
The new hamburger packaging was not wholly a new idea, for the same material had been used in the familiar foam egg cartons that were then becoming ubiquitous in supermarkets, but the fast-food application seemed brilliant. The rigid plastic-foam container kept the temperature and moisture in, absorbed grease without becoming unsightly or soggy itself, and provided a neat, colorful, and distinctive one-piece package for the Big Mac. Furthermore, by the mid-1970s there was a growing concern over the profligate use of paper as packaging, and the clamshell thus seemed to constitute an environmentally innovative approach.
The Big Mac clamshell was hailed by designers as a model achievement, and eventually other McDonald’s products were being sold in similar packaging, with the clamshell appropriately colored and printed to distinguish, say, a Quarter Pounder from a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. In time, the basic design evolved into a related product that looked somewhat like one flat-opened clamshell covered by another. This provided a divided package that was integral to the marketing of a new sandwich, the McDLT. One compartment of the double polystyrene shell kept a hamburger warm, and the other kept the lettuce and tomato cool, until the customer was ready to combine the ingredients.
When a still newer sandwich, the McChicken, was introduced, it was packaged in a modified clamshell that emphasized one disadvantage of the original design, which seems to have been overlooked amid all the hoopla accompanying the introduction and acceptance of the plastic box—namely, that it was not very easy to get the Big Mac or Quarter Pounder out of the deep half-shell in which it sat. To make the clamshell much bigger than the hamburger would have made the food look skimpy, yet the fit was so tight it was hard for diners to get their fingers beneath the sandwich, and it was necessary to tip the package over for access to its contents. The new McChicken was packaged in a modified clamshell whose bottom was tapered down from the hinge to the latch so that, when the box was opened, one side of the sandwich was exposed to the fingers for easy removal. This clear improvement in the basic design eliminated the little annoyance of its predecessors but was not adopted for other McDonald’s sandwiches, presumably because there was a reluctance to tamper with the “classic” designs that had become so familiar. But, however familiar, these same designs that once seemed so successful from certain functional perspectives, soon came to be seen as failures from other ones.
When first introduced, the McDonald’s clamshell appeared to be the ideal packaging for a fast-food hamburger. The polystyrene-foam box not only kept the heat and moisture in but also absorbed neatly any errant grease. Furthermore, the hamburger could be boxed in one quick flip of the lid and opened just as easily. Unfortunately, what was once heralded as a brilliant piece of packaging became such an environmental nightmare for the restaurant chain that it reverted to paper packaging. (photo credit 13.1)
Within a decade of its introduction, the clamshell began to be attacked as a symbol of wasteful packaging and a threat to the environment. Paper was still a problem, of course, but plastics were perceived to be a worse one. The chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used in forming the plastic-foam container were implicated in the depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer. McDonald’s showed itself to be responsive to environmental concerns by switching to plastic packaging made without CFCs, and the phase-out was completed in 1988. In 1990 the restaurant chain was highlighting the decision in corporate promotional material, stating that the move had been supported by environmental organizations and the Environmental Protection Agency. But even if environmental groups did concur with McDonald’s efforts in behalf of the ozone layer, other differences were not necessarily resolved.
The polystyrene clamshell had a useful life of only the short time it held a sandwich from the counter to the table, and the seemingly eternal afterlife of the package made it a very visible contributor to growing litter and pollution problems. The clamshell failed to satisfy environmentalists because it was not biodegradable and it bulked out the contents of landfills. By the late 1980s, the continued criticism of its packaging by environmental activists led McDonald’s to explore the possibility of recycling its plastic food containers, but there was skepticism as to whether such an effort was economically feasible. The polystyrene clamshells were often held up as the most visible symbol of profligate disregard for the environment, the commingling of differently processed polystyrene salad bowls and lids, polyethylene-coated paper cups, polypropylene straws, and other fast-food packaging and accessories made it difficult to separate them all for recycling. Furthermore, cleaning up the waste was problematic, compacting it was messy, and storing it unwashed and in bulk was malodorous and space-consuming. Finally, in 1990, the corporation declared that by the end of the year it would begin to phase out the plastic packaging in favor of paper.
The McDonald’s plastic clamshells had accounted for about 10 percent of the sales of Amoco Foam Products Company, a division of the oil corporation, and for about 7 or 8 percent of the one billion pounds of foam packaging manufactured in the United States each year. McDonald’s was able to make what seemed to be an overnight change in policy because, as it came under increasing attack by environmental groups, the corporation had for some time been weighing the pros and cons of paper versus plastic packaging. In announcing the change, the company’s president posed with the director of the Environmental Defense Fund, behind a table crowded with tall piles of foam boxes and the much more modest pile of paper that would replace them. But environmentalists were by no means unanimous in hailing McDonald’s decision. Although the Environmental Action Foundation noted that the “polystyrene production process is polluting and the styrene monomer is a suspected human carcinogen,” a scientist from the National Audubon Society received the food chain’s announcement with less enthusiasm, pointing out that paper was also a pollutant.
Others used the occasion of the packaging-design change to make a further point. In the wake of McDonald’s announcement, one of its arch-competitors took out full-page newspaper ads declaring “Burger King applauds McDonald’s for its new environmental consciousness.” But, the ad continued, “Welcome to the club. We wonder what the planet would be like if you had joined us in 1955?” Nineteen fifty-five was the year since which the then newly created Burger King had used mainly paper packaging. Polystyrene coffee cups were an exception, and in late 1990 they were in the process of being replaced by thick-paper cups.
All of these decisions were clearly more politically than technologically driven, pointing up the complex dynamics behind the evolution of artifacts. The conventional wisdom is that technology affects society in irreversible ways and that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in a poem, “Things are in the saddle, / and ride mankind.” However, we might also extend the metaphor by recognizing that we are capable of rearing up and bucking off things that we find too burdensome or that we f
eel are taking us in the wrong direction. But, in spite of the spectrum of forces at work in pushing and pulling the form of everything from plastic packaging to the hamburger it contains, there remains a unifying principle behind all influences on form. That principle is embodied in the concept of failure, whether in regard to the technological function of keeping the hamburger fresh and warm or the social function of achieving a healthy and clean environment. The failure of a particular package to perform either of these functions can introduce forces toward change or redesign. But, as the example of hamburger packaging so neatly compresses into the span of a decade and a half, what connotes failure one year may not do so fifteen years hence.
Our collective political memory may understandably seem not to be so long as even four years; for all its supposed objectivity, our technological memory can seem just as short and as subject to slogans over substance, to promises over proof. It was, after all, a rather objective judgment that the foam clamshell did for the Big Mac and McDLT what paper packaging could not. In announcing McDonald’s environmentally responsible decision, the company president had to admit that the new containers would not retain heat as well as foam. According to one report, he said that “improvements in cooking methods since the company last used paper-based packaging in the early 1970s would compensate.” He also said that “the technology of the cooking process has caught up to the defects of paper,” but certainly the truth of that assertion is going to boil down to a question of taste. As for the McDLT, whose very concept relied on the dual-chambered foam package, that was admitted to be “a very difficult problem” indeed. In fact, the McDLT was unavailable while new packaging was being developed.
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are. Page 25
