The Rise of Quiet Design

Jasper Morrison's Good Thing Soap

In an increasingly busy world, quiet design, it appears, is on the rise. From minimalist design styles to paired back ingredients and simplified messaging, new brands are favouring the time-honoured Bauhaus ethos of 'form follows function'.

The innovation is beyond pure design; product ranges are appearing that also subvert our value systems, selling quality products at an increasingly affordable price, and using direct-to-consumer models, thereby revolutionising industries that have long enjoyed huge mark-ups, in game-changing brands from eyewear to beauty and fragrance.

The movement is becoming increasingly apparent across the design field, from branding to packaging and product. Here are some recent examples that are agitating staid categories and breathing new life into tired markets.

Wise Men's Care

Wise Men's Care is a new personal care range that combines stripped back branding with eco credentials. Designed by Canadian branding agency Ethos, the range offers innovation on many levels: their products are made from natural and healthy ingredients, whilst their paired-back packaging limits plastic use: each product is available in two different refillable containers - a reusable glass bottle, designed for the traveller, and a more robust cardboard container perfect for the intrepid outdoorsman.

Wise Men's Care

British designer Jasper Morrison has re-designed an everyday household product in a similar vein: his 'Soap' product, for Brooklyn-based design brand Good Thing, is a simple, translucent glycerin soap, sold in a mould of four, that can be snapped and arranged around the house at various locations.

Jasper Morrison's 'Soap'

The soap itself is similarly stripped back; it is made from only a few materials, and is fragrance-free, hypoallergenic and gentle on the skin.

Good Thing’s founder, Jamie Wolfond, told Dezeen:

"The idea to create a bar of soap stemmed from our belief that this elemental and historically rich tool should be elementary in its nature — it should do what it's supposed to do, do it well, and do it without anything unnecessary.”

Good Thing believe that every object in the home can be simplified to simplify the lives of its users.

Shaking up the fragrance world is A.N. Other, a Miami-based fragrance company developed by world-renowned perfumers, creating limited edition fine fragrances at an affordable price.

A.N Other

As a result of their 'direct to consumer' model - no retail overheads here - the brand can afford to work with different and innovative perfumers from across the globe. The brand creates collections of four simple limited edition fragrances every year - woody, oriental, fresh and floral.

A.N Other

Co-founder Gilad Amozeg states:

“We are resolute in offering an uncompromising portfolio at an affordable price that focuses on sustainability and ethically sourced raw ingredients and materials…Our moral compass has given us the guidance to strip away the unnecessary expense for the licensing, distribution and celebrity endorsements, allowing us to produce a world-class product that can be sold for less."

Socio Design were tasked to communicate this ethos, via brand strategy, name, identity, packaging and ecommerce. Of the project, Socio Design explains:

“The brand utilises the visual language of ‘default design’ as a way to simultaneously communicate high quality and value, leveraging the visual language of ‘utility’ to reference both modern luxury and staple goods. This enabled us to communicate the exceptional quality at the heart of the product whilst making it accessible to a wider audience.”

In a category filled to the brim with gaudy branding and neon packaging, consumer packaged goods company Brandless has emerged, with a mission: 'better stuff, fewer dollars'. Their one-price-fits-all approach applies across everyday food and household products, with a similarly paired back approach to packaging design, employing simple text and colour-blocked ranges.

Brandless

The company aim to highlight the 'BrandTax' each consumer unwittingly pays when buying traditional brands, instead focusing on 'just what matters'. This translates to standards such as fair-trade and gluten-free, whilst also being kinder to the environment through packaging design and materials. The brand also does good, partnering with the Feeding America charity to donate a meal each time a consumer places an order.

Brandless

Brandless founders Tina Sharkey and Ido Leffler state:

“With Brandless, we wanted to invent something completely fresh and new. Something that puts purpose into every product and message shared, and models a new kind of relationship between people and the companies built to serve them directly, with integrity, transparency, authenticity, and democratized access.”

Topline Tools is a similar brand to emerge, this time to revolutionize the hardware and DIY marketplace. The range offers clear, concise packaging stands out from what Topline Tools describes as a ‘visually manic hardware environment'.

Topline

The design agency Parsons Branding created a minimal range of packaging for the brand, using simple linear product illustrations to communicate clearly to an often time-poor consumer. The range is simple and uncluttered, communicating top quality at an affordable price range. The redesign includes product-specific illustrations, and re-written product instructions which aim to take the confusion out of DIY.

Quiet branding's rise across many different industries offers key points to consider for any brand:

• Do Good: Consider the environment in packaging design choices. Could single-use packaging be replaced with refillable or biodegradable packaging, less printing ink or materials? Ethical considerations could include fair-trade and charitable partnerships, which further enhance brand values
• Simplify: Your consumer is likely to be time-poor and visually over-stimulated. Consider ways in which your packaging can effectively communicate what it is, how it functions, and core brand values. For example, natural materials could communicate a product rich in natural ingredients
• Luxury Quality: Many brands are moving into the 'luxury quality' space, disrupting traditional business models by offering quality ingredients and luxury branding at an affordable price. Consider how your branding could communicate this ethos, through luxury yet utilitarian design

Beazley Designs of the Year

From ink sucked out of car exhausts to a seat made from Chilean lava, the Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition at London's Design Museum showcases a vision of the future through design innovation.

© Luke Hayes, Design Museum

Grouped around 5 themes - Innovators, Activists, Brands, Makers and Builders - the designs on show reflect many of the most important issues upon us today: the environment, political divisions and humanitarian causes, the changing face of branding, the importance and revival of craft skills, and buildings and how they can adapt to complex local conditions.

Future Cities

Some of the most impressive designs on show were within the Innovator category, where designers were tackling the environmental challenges of transport, and how our future cities could operate.

Carlo Ratti - Italian architect, engineer, inventor, educator and activist - showed his 'Light Traffic' project, a traffic system designed for our future self-driving age.

The project sees sensor-equipped vehicles smoothly flow across a junction. Each car is allocated a crossing slot when they approach a junction, with their speed correspondingly adjusted to facilitate a safe distance from other cars. The technology could see huge reductions in both journey times and the amount of pollution emitted from otherwise stationary traffic.

Ratti states:

“Traffic intersections are particularly complex spaces, because you have [at least] two flows of traffic competing for the same piece of real estate. A slot-based system moves the focus from the traffic flow level to the vehicle level. Ultimately, it’s a much more efficient system, because vehicles will get to an intersection exactly when there is a slot available to them.”

(For Londoners, Carlo Ratti's forthcoming Royal Academy talk, 'Do you live in a senseable city?' is on 18th February. Tickets can be bought here)

Carlo Ratti 'Light Traffic' (Video courtesy of Dezeen)

Further sensor-led innovations hinted at new solutions for mass transit; the Autonomous Rapid Transit (Art) is a train which runs without a railway track and has many advantages over traditional transportation - it is easier to navigate than a bus, more flexible than a traditional train, and cheaper than running a metro. The train is currently in use in China, with plans to trial the system in America.

Autonomous Rapid Transit , image courtesy Design Museum

Creating a 'smart, safe and sustainable option for getting around', 'Olli' is the world's first self-driving, electric, cognitive, partially 3D-printed vehicle. Produced in partnership with IBM Watson, customers can simply book a trip via an app, much like an Uber. Once in the 12-seater shuttle, customers can chat with Olli, who can give local recommendations and weather advice.

'Olli', image courtesy Technical Institute of Denmark

The field of sensor-led and big data design was pivotal to some recent consultancy work I undertook about the future of the mobile workforce for a major technology company. My research uncovered the huge possibilities of new smart buildings, where sensors, big data and technology will combine to create a more harmonious, productive, energy-efficient and personalised workspace for happier employees.

Manufacturing Redesigned

Several projects on show sought to reinvent traditional manufacturing processes, incorporating new 3D printing technologies to create benefits for the environment and in democratising design.

Othr is a brand at the cutting edge of 3D print design. Billed as 'a de-centralised Bauhaus for the 21st century', the company collaborates with designers across the globe, using Dropbox and Skype to circumvent the limitations of geographical locations. Designer collaborations have linked the brand's New York City studio to designers from countries such as Bangalore, Norway, Montreal, Valencia, Brussels and Switzerland.

Zoë Mowat for Othr

As designer and judging panel member Steven Learner states:

"With the cost of living in major creative capitals skyrocketing, this working method may soon become a reality for designers everywhere."

Claiming to have surpassed the possibilities of 3D printing before it's even been fully realised, Rapid Liquid Printing is a process involving a robotic apparatus that extrudes shapes in a tank of gel. The gel hardens as it is printed, creating shapes that immediately become objects.

Interestingly, the process was developed by the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in association with Steelcase, an American furniture company.

Rapid Liquid Prototyping at Design Miami, image courtesy Dezeen

Second Life

Environmental concerns are at the forefront of many designer's minds, evident in the array of material innovations on show at the Design Museum. Many designers are turning to working with materials that are found abundantly in nature, that naturally biodegrade, or are developing processes that upcycle existing materials.

ECOALF is an upcycling initiative from Madrid that converts waste from the sea bed, such as pellets, yarn and fabric, into a selection of wearable products including accessories, clothing and footwear. The resulting products are designed to prompt the fashion industry into reconsidering how they could be more environmentally-friendly.

Image courtesy ECOALF

Similarly working with upcycled materials, furniture designer Max Lamb has collaborated with Kvadrat on a series of benches that are made from recycled textiles. The project aims to show the possibilities of Kvadrat's 'Really' sustainability start-up, which uses end-of-life fabrics such as cotton and wool.

Max Lamb for Kvadrat

gt2P, a design collective based in Santiago, began experimenting with the highly abundant material of lava back in 2013, and have since created lamps, tiles and stools from the material. The design collective are releasing their research data this year, hoping to promote wider applications in new and existing industries.

'Remolten' by gt2P

Operating at the opposite end of the design life cycle, Christien Meindertsma's Flax Chair is entirely biodegradable. The chair is cut from a board - comprising flax and a sustainable glue derived from sugar cane and corn starch - before being bent into form. The designer chose to work with flax after discovering it required very little resources to grow. The chair is the winner of two Dutch Design Awards.

Flax chair by Christien Meindertsma

The Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition shows an exciting and optimistic vision of the future, from sustainable material innovations, to future-ready manufacturing and smart sensor-led cities. The exhibition continues at the Design Museum until the 18th February.