Esthetics in farming. My thoughts.
Viktor Kvachan
Ukrainian-Slovakian Entrepreneur, Founder of EHOSS: Icon of Livestock Innovation
This article is written by Viktor Kvachan, the father of horse engineering, innovator and founder of EHOSS.
We bought special laboratory devices for fractionating, packaging and labelling different fractions of animal manure. The output is laboratory bags the A4 size of a stationery pack. This is only the first link in a long chain of non-standard approaches to the esthetic presentation of our products at various events. Very soon we will have an interesting video review on these bags.
The first impression is really important.
It doesn't matter what kind of product or equipment you create. We are all visuals. Everyone who had the opportunity to get to know us better, without exception, appreciated the design of our EHOSS products, our website and our style. I understand that this is just the beginning for us. Esthetics is extremely important in our project. It's strange, on the one hand, we work with biomass (manure and hay, to be precise), on the other hand, what does esthetics have to do with it.
Two angles of looking at esthetics.
For me, there are two perceptions of esthetics. First, the top-down view is a subconscious perception of what we see, which leads us to create an image, a fantasy.
The second, the view from below, is a conscious perception of what we see and a comparison of what we see with the meaning, event and mechanisms.
If the first glance should be a unique design that is really so pleasant that it doesn't matter if the equipment cleans hay for horse consumption or recycles animal manure.
The second glance is the feeling that all the mechanisms work perfectly, create a synergy of technology and metal, and everything can be controlled from your phone in one click.
The esthetic environment of the product.
A product is esthetic when there are no irritating factors on the outside. In our case, this means virtually no noise from the equipment, and most importantly, a clean, dust-free environment.
This is critically important in farming or horse breeding. Noise affects the psychological state of people and animals. Dust affects the health of people and animals. Of course, the design itself is primarily about the desire to touch our equipment. Therefore, everything should be as easy to operate and maintain as possible.
Technology and esthetics in farming.
It's a real problem here. I honestly cannot give an example of the most technologically advanced farm equipment that would impress me with its esthetics. Although I've been in this niche for the last 20 years, I've seen everything and all over the world. For some reason, it seems to me that farming is generally the last in line for esthetics and technology.
For me, technology in farming is not so much about artificial intelligence and cloud solutions, but rather about modern engineering components, modern electronics, modern means of control and information display. All of our platforms are like that. Yes, they have everything from IoT, but I have it by default.
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For me, the foundation of technology is always simplicity, reliability and durability. When one of my friends told me that I was not normal to give a 4-year warranty on all equipment, he was right, we should try to work our products so that the warranty period increases with each new product update. Modern online solutions that are closely integrated with the metal pile are also important. In our case, it is a mapping service and soon a biomass trading platform. Of course, a cool app on your phone is essential.
Behind the scenes of EHOSS esthetics.
The first is our unique logo, a horse depicted as tracks on a board. Then we created our own font - our name is written in this font. And the main element on all our products is the red line, which always goes on the left side and has the contours of the line borrowed from the main logo. In fact, product design is a considerable cost. But in my deep conviction, it is also an additional incentive to buy. And it doesn't matter if it's a 7-tonne manure processing machine, a 2-tonne hay preparation machine, or any other equipment we have - the key is esthetics in my understanding of the word.
So for me, esthetics is the brand's identity, its appearance, safe environment, full integration of all modern technologies, ease of operation and maintenance, and incredible reliability. All of this creates the EHOSS brand, and hence the esthetics in horse breeding, the esthetics in farming, and soon the esthetics in bioenergy.
There is a really interesting question about the esthetics and value of the product, but that will be another article, my friends.
The photos above are interesting moments of people's impressions of our project at various EHOSS events.