Dedicated to inspiring designers, inventors & the creative spirit in all of us.

Have you ever wondered why the length of a CD is 74 minutes? Or why a snooze alarm is 9 minutes?  Or why a text message is 140 characters?  Here are the stories behind the numbers:

When Sony was designing an audio disc, the longest version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was their point of reference.  The slowest known version of Beethoven’s Ninth, at 74 minutes, was recorded in 1951 by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele — this is why you are limited to only 74 minutes on a CD.

When the snooze alarm was invented, clocks relied on gears.  The engineers had to choose between 9 plus minutes or 10 plus minutes for the extra time for people to sleep. Due to gear configurations the engineers opted for 9 minutes.  Even today, non-reliant on gears, a digital clock’s snooze is set at 9 minutes.

When developing a universal messaging format in the 1980’s, a committee of programmers considered two convincing facts.  One, postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters and, two, Telex (a telegraphy messaging system for business professionals) contained about the same amount of characters.  From that time forward, 160 characters were the character limitations for SMS.

3M Canada hosted a design competition and the above are the winning entries, both from students of the Ontario College of Art and Design. The Scotch tape dispenser and post-it note dispensers were awarded the grand prize of actually going into production for the 2010 line of office products. I am in awe at how simple, yet clever the tape dispenser design is. Bravo to the winners!

Somebody explain this to me. Where is the reflection of the photographer in the first picture, why is that thing not sliding off the mountainside in the second picture, and who would ever want to sleep naked in a petri dish atop a mountain? (Besides the obvious question, who hikes in all white clothes to the top of the Alta Badia mountains in Italy?) It’s conceptual designs like this that would have my family thinking that, as an industrial designer, I wear turtlenecks, dress monochromatically and dream of designing lunar space stations for unicorns. Conceptual design must have some truth in it. What I want you, the reader, to learn from this is that your design must relate to the user, have some truth to it and allow viewers to not be distracted by obvious flaws in the use of the product.