Why Some Designs Are Impossible to Improve: Quintessence

All content directed and written by John Mauriello. John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is an Adjunct Professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts.

Some designs don’t change much. The paperclip, the Bic pen, the QWERTY keyboard layout, and even the PlayStation controller. Decades and sometimes even centuries pass, but these designs barely change at all. They’re quintessential. Why do some designs last for decades, while other seemingly better alternatives never catch on?

Time stamps:
0:00 Intro to Quintessential Design
2:49 Paperclips & Manufacturing Process
3:46 Maglite: Intellectual Property, Patents, & Legal Strategies
4:55 Opera
5:56 Maglite part 2
8:19 Setting the Standard: Playstation Controllers & QWERTY Keyboard
12:20 Designs that Change Culture: Model T
21:49 Indispensable Addictions
30:28 The Fifth Element

[IanZainea]

Touch screen on a smartphone makes sense. Because you look right at it 95% of the time when using it. Touch screens in a car, do not make sense. Because you're not supposed to be looking at it.

[MrRandominternetname]

My parents received a Sunbeam toaster as a wedding gift in 1961. It died in 2015. We were all heartbroken. The new toaster takes too long and don't toast as well.

[baldeagle]

I *really* miss my old flip phone; you couldn't kill the blasted thing. I lost it in the snow for hours and when I found it, it just worked.

[sirBumpyCase]

Something Alec Said in another video is "The only thing better than perfect is standardized." Sometimes in order to change to something better, you have to get everybody to change and that's just not possible in all situations.

[ZeeengMicro]

Maybe the 5th element is the friends we made along the way

[kyle]

Don't forget the classic wooden Pencil with eraser, and the Boston Pencil Sharpener.
The helical blade sharpener is the quintessential mechanical sharpener design thats been used in every wall sharpener in schools and offices for the past 100 years.

[radanvasulin]

The "classic" toaster mechanism also allows for simple lifetime limitation: a thin steel spring that WILL break at some point. I kept noticing the toasters thrown away, so I picked one up, took it apart - and all it was the broken steel "pin" spring. Fixed in 5 minutes.

[squiddler]

10:04 The Wii remote didn't quite replace regular controllers, but it did actually innovate in a way that's affected (nearly) every modern controller. The motion controls that started out as a gimmick ended up turning into gyro controls that were built into every future nintendo console. They allowed you to have just as much precision as a mouse and keyboard with the form factor of a controller, and the same gyro aiming was even added to Playstation controllers by the PS4. These days it's a standard feature, xbox controllers are the only ones that haven't adopted it yet.

[ingvarhallstrom]

The reason for Mag-Lites success was that it was a weapon in disguise. While nightsticks could be banned in some areas for being a weapon, a flashlight would not. As noted, even when police where forbidden to use nightsticks they loved carrying a big ass Mag-Lite.

[ericfieldman]

Please don't stop making these videos man, this stuff is so interesting and applicable, and almost fundamentally something most people aren't meant to think about as much as they should

[Jesse-lvyo]

I love that they used a clip of Spyro crashing into the side of a ledge as they were explaining how joysticks helped players navigate 3-D space more easily. That transition was such a learning curve for gamers and those few seconds summed it all up so perfectly.

[a.p.]

Fun little fact about the design of the Model T: it did *not* use the control layout we are are familiar with today. Carmakers hadn't settled on a standard for that yet, and the Model T used what we would today think of as an *extremely* weird control layout; the brake pedal was on the right and the throttle was on the steering wheel alongside the manual spark advance.

Rather than a hand shifter and clutch pedal, it had a weird combination 2 speed gear shifter and clutch pedal on the left, and a separate pedal in the center for reverse. Holding the shifter/clutch pedal about halfway put the car in neutral, and pushing it down to the floor would put it in 1st gear (you did this gradually while giving it a bit of gas with the hand throttle to start smoothly and avoid killing the engine). To shift into second, you pulled your foot off the clutch shifter, letting it move all the way back towards you. Basically, "clutch in" was the middle position, moving the pedal down disengaged the clutch in first gear, and moving the pedal up disengaged the clutch in second gear.

Which caused a few slightly weird effects, compared to modern cars. For one, driving along at low speed required you to hold the fairly stiff clutch pedal down the entire time with your left foot. For another, driving at high speed actually didn't involve your feet on the controls at all. Also, you could immediately shift into reverse at any time by pressing the reverse pedal.

The first car with a modern control layout was actually the 1916 Cadillac Type 53, and it just kinda stuck.

[hileutewie]

The flashlight gained popularity in Germany among taxi drivers, because it was so easily abused as a weapon for self defence. A club or baseball bat was considered a weapon - a massive flashlight on the other hand was just used to help finding houses at night. I know quite a few people that aren't taxi drivers, that had one of those in their car as well. As you say, it's just a confidence booster to know you could defend yourself if there is something happening.
Skype during its early days wasn't just a (video-)chat software. It was used in companies to check in on employes too, due to the online status changing by default, if the user was AFK for too long.

[colindonoghue]

Favorite quote about the model T and its focus on simplicity was about paint color “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.” Henry Ford

[andrewweisbrod]

One of my favorite quintessential designs is the codex, the bound book. By dividing a scroll into leaves, you can quickly access any part of the text, and writing on both sides of the sheet doubles the density of information. E-books are convenient for copying, transporting, and reference, but the march of file formats may render them unusable in a few years time, whereas the codex as a format isn't leaving us anytime soon.

[onlineplus]

This guy looks like if John Travolta was Freddie Mercury's son

[meganegan]

One of the things that applied to Fordlandia was that Ford took the Midwest house idea so seriously that he even made them all face South, as they do in America, and failed to consider that the reason you do that is to make sure the porch gives plenty of shade in the *Northern Hemisphere*, but Brazilian homes typically face to the North. His cultural jingoism went so far he wouldn't even consider the consequences of a round Earth.

[slugfiller]

The QWERTY layout key-jamming story is actually an urban legend created by Dvorak manufacturers to convince people that Dvorak should be objectively better. In reality, QWERTY is the result of incremental design improvements, which started with an alphabetical layout, and gradually moved various keys to locations that made more sense, like moving rarely used keys like Q, Z, and X to the corners. You can actually notice much of the alphabetical order remains, as, with the notable exception of B, the letters A through P are all very close, if not adjacent, to the letters that follow or precede them.

[Rob-qecg]

In response to the controller segment, the Wii mote *did* establish a new standard for motion controllers. Any VR controller today has the wii mote dna: a bar with a directional control under the thumb, a trigger, and some face buttons. That discounting that a Wii mote is just the NES controller sideways plus some extra buttons.

[surajvkothari]

If only I had a dollar every time he said "quintessential". Amazing video by the way!