Homage to the Unknown Designer

Some designers get all of the credit and acclaim, while others are quietly influential. Here I shine the spotlight on those Unknown Designers

Brilliant inspiring design is all around us. Sometimes it is in the simplest most mundane things. I have a watch by Mondaine known as the "Homage to the Unknown Designer" which has a paper-clip embedded in its face. Such a simple object; a single metal wire with three 180° bends in it. And yet it is so useful, so elegant in its simplicity, so ubiquitous. It is such an everyday and disposable item that we don't think about the fact that someone thought of that when no one had before. I don't imagine that there was a huge amount of evolution that went into the design of the paperclip, it just worked and left little room for improvement after that, becoming the defacto standard design for a device to temporarily hold sheets of paper together.

It is such an everyday and disposable item that we don't think about the fact that someone thought of that when no one had before

Another absurdly common stationery tool would appear by contrast to be the ultimate evolution of a design that like the paperclip, has a common form that actually isn't all that obvious when you think about it. Have you ever really looked at that metal pencil-sharpener that every school child has in their pencil case and which in all likelihood you have somewhere in your workspace right now? That wedge-shaped magnesium block with its ribbed indentations for your fingers and a blade held on by a single tiny screw. You could be forgiven for thinking that there is some universal standard that has been published and to which all pencil sharpeners must comply with but no, this is simply such a perfect design that literally thousands of factories all over the world are churning out identical little copies of it. Who first produced this design? Who actually designed it? It is another masterpiece of the Unknown Designer.

In philosophy the teleological argument is the argument for the existence of God based on the notion that the world has clearly been designed and therefore there must be a designer, a creator of everything. Certainly the natural world has some sublime examples of great design, and whether they are the result of intelligent design or natural selection and evolution, we can learn a lot from them. After all, if natural selection can get us from scraping pencils with a knife to a magnesium pencil-sharpener within a few decades, who are we to argue with millions of years of evolution. Perhaps the greatest example of food packaging is the banana. The banana skin is tough enough to protect the fruit inside from a reasonable amount of abuse, yet is easily opened with the bare hands and even forms its own handle so that you don't get your hands dirty while eating it. It also stays in one piece making disposal of the (of course biodegradable) wrapper easy. I don't believe that any other food packaging comes close. The apple needs cleaning, citrus fruits can be hard to open and messy to eat, what other fruit is packaged as perfectly as the banana? In fact it is so perfect that it's hard to understand how it has remained unique in its form factor and neither evolution nor selective breeding has managed to adapt other fruit to this brilliant design. Imagine how convenient an orange would be if you could peel it like a banana and the sectors came off in bite-sized slices. Most chocolate bars are actually packaged quite similarly to the banana. You peel the wrapper of a Mars bar and hold that keeping your hands chocolate-free, disposing of the wrapper only when you've finished eating the food inside, just as you do with the banana. Consciously or otherwise we have imitated this ingenious natural design.

Imagine how convenient an orange would be if you could peel it like a banana

Great design is all around us, but sometimes, like the paper clip, its elegant simplicity makes it invisible. Sometimes, like the pencil sharpener, it hides in plain sight behind its ubiquity. Like the banana it quietly influences without claiming any credit.

Designers often want the credit, they want to be known for what they have created, but the ultimate incentive of designers is to make the world a better place, and the best way to do that is to be influential. And what is more influential than for your solutions to be utterly ubiquitous even if you remain forever the Unknown Designer? So let's raise a glass to the Unknown Designer. Having opened the bottle of course with a waiter's friend corkscrew.

Nir Kahn is the Director of Design for?Plasan?and has been responsible for vehicle design in the company for almost 20 years, including the design of the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP, Oshkosh M-ATV, and the?Plasan SandCat