Target Stores and Design

OK, so I'm a Furniture and Product designer by education and profession. I'll get that out of the way up front. Target's greatest edge over competing stores, in my view, is their stated focus on design. They even do follow up on that promise most of the time.

I needed a TV tray stand, and noticed Target had some good looking wood ones on sale recently. I was one of 6 kids and TV trays were common and popular items in my home as well as the homes of my baby boomer generation friends. That was 40 years ago, and what stuns me about the Target TV stand I picked up is how it is exactly the same in look and function as those of my childhood. It is so unchanged in design that it has the same flaws.

Flaws:
- The x-frame can pinch fingers when folding up.
- The lower stretcher between sides is too low to tuck your feet under, despite the fact that it is right where your feet naturally want to be when using the stand.
- The legs are too close together. A few more inches and the user could have choices of how to sit rather than being forced to sit with knees together straight legged under the tray.

Now there HAS been a little design since that TV tray of my childhood was available. You can get wood or metal trays. You can get rectangular or oval or extra wide or lipped trays now. These are mainly aesthetic changes. Design, though, can be both aesthetic and functional. My designer mind can see easy ways to improve on this x-frame design that would be less expensive to produce, easier to store, original in style, and more useful as a portable tray.

I mentioned in earlier blogs that I have an Ipod Touch. I've been looking in all my local stores for any kind of case I can keep it in. It's a new product, and anything for it is slow to the stores. They do have all sorts of arm band and belt clip and such for the assorted other dozen or so MP3 players out there. Target has a dozen or so devices you can plug your ipod into for some amplification of the music it plays. None of these are optimized for the iTouch or iPhone. The unique nature of both ipods demand a unique set of products to support them. I'll predict an armband holder for both that will allow you to rotate the screen 360 degrees and yet hold it in either a vertical or horizontal position when you want it there. It will also need to let you flip the iTouch or iPhone over to protect the screen and be held on the inside of your forearm. In a perfect world, the armband will have a bluetooth dock connector that will send the music wirelessly to your bluetooth earpiece or headphones. If your headphones have basic controls (like Play, Pause, Next Track, Previous Track, Stop, etc.) they'll work to control the music. I've got a nice pair of bluetooth headphones from Best Buy that I'd love to use in conjuction with my iTouch.

Another iTouch prediction: The browser and Music App both rotate as you rotate your itouch, to keep the info you are looking at aligned with your point of view. None of the other included Apps do. If I have the iTouch or iPhone on my arm, I'll want the clock or calendar at least to rotate so I can read them without twisting my head. I'll predict that in some update of the firmware Apple will add rotation to all the basic apps. They also need to improve the calculator. Yes, 3rd party apps could add the needed improvements. These Ipods should be better with what they include right out of the box, though. I predict they will get better.

Tell me what products you've seen at Target that are the same as they were 20 or more years ago. I'll bet you they could be improved both functionally and aesthetically. Sadly the things that haven't changed have remained the same because they continue to be just good enough. Did you imagine that your house would look just like your parents house when you grew up? I watched the Jetsons, and am wondering why furniture and product design hasn't taken ANY great steps forward since that show was on. Little steps, yes. Big steps, barely.

iTouching

I'm convinced that multitouch interfaces are going to become more and more prevelant, and show up on LCDs you can get with your VISTA or Leopard operating system PC. Both Microsoft and Apple are playing with the technology as is evident in Apple's iPod Touch and Microsoft's Surface coffee table.

There is obviously a conflict of scale between these two devices. The Surface has to be one of the ugliest coffee tables I've seen in a long time. The iTouch is small enough that I need reading glasses to see it. Yet I would love to have a coffee table sized iTouch as the main interface to my media in my home theater room(s). It is a self-contained computer that using wireless can access all the media I have stored on my local network. It is self powered with a rechargeable battery.

Any PC related electronics one adds to a coffee table imediately requires cables across or through the floor. Imagine a 32" or 40" interactive multitouch display as your coffee table that didn't have a single cable attached to anything. Yes, I'll allow periodic connection to a power outlet for recharging. Perhaps an OLED screen for low power consumption. Built-in wireless networking, and wireless network control of the media center PC actually displaying movies and playing surround sound through my A/V receiver.

I'm a furniture designer so I'm sure I could come up with a nice frame and base, and a strategy for protecting the surface when it wasn't being used. Coffee tables get used for far more that media interaction, ya know.

The multitouch interface would be great for multiperson game play on the same surface. With different points of view, each person sitting around the table could grab and rotate any open window to orient it to their position. Pass photos around. Actually slide them across the surface. Imagine a Pool game taking up the whole top, with pool table physics perfectly calculated. Put some spin on the cue ball based on how you touch it. Play a pinball game, and tilt the table a little (and the related physics of the balls) by touching one or more corners of the table. Flipper buttons would be spots on the screen you could position wherever they were most comfortable to use.

More on Multitouch later. I'd like to point out that one day after my first post Steve Jobs announced he would open up the iPhone and iTouch to third party apps. Steve, if you're reading this, contact me. I'll help you make a coffee table version of the iTouch.

Future Thoughts

10/16/2007

I guess this is as good as any other starting point. This blog will hopefully be a useful output point for all my future ruminations, as I am a future thinker. For example, I know no one will read this until sometime after I write it. No point in writing for the moment, eh?

iTouch. We went to get a Nano for my wife, but came home with an Ipod Touch for me. Wonderful technology, a little hampered in it's first rendition. I can't believe Apple doesn't already have plans for greater utilization. Makes sense, as a new device that is perfect from the start leaves no demand for the "next" version. The hacker community has already found a way to add more functionality to it via 3rd-party application install. I predict Apple will eventually update the device with much of what the best 3rd-party apps are giving the hackers. Email is a no-brainer. Contacts too, although I'm not sure the contacts application is crippled as I've been able to add data to it.

I'll add another prediction: that with it's great multi-touch technology, there will be a version of brain-age made for it. I don't own a Nintedo dual screen, but the best games for it could probably be ported to the Ipod Touch.

That Multitouch screen is also needing a killer application. About all it is good for with installed applications is to zoom in (I'll call that flicking) or zoom out (pinching) on information. I can see a great 3D modeling potential, with multitouch letting one interact somewhat like molding clay.

More futures for the Ipod Touch, I'm sure.