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Your Home Is Being Invaded By Little Spaceships!

Your Home Is Being Invaded By Little Spaceships!

Space Invaders by People People Swedish Design

For everyone not involved in product design (which is most of you out there) this might not be so obvious, and the reasons for it unknown. For some designers however, such as ourselves, this is nothing but a growing global crisis.

We want to ask the open question: Why should things that belong in our homes, look like they belong in space?

After working for many years in product design and product development, we have realized some of the forces behind this invasion. The main reason might sound a bit crude, but we are pretty sure that the spaceship-design-shapes happen because many designers think they are more fun to sketch. And since it has been like this for a long time, people in product development teams accept it as normal, and continue to approve of these kind of aesthetics. The industry continues to be male dominated (a problem of it’s own), and what is the most common object in these guys sketchbooks? Cars. These guys love to design vacuum cleaners because they have wheels and resemble cars, and they end up looking like they do 1-100km/h in less than 10 seconds, when the preferred home context in fact is calm and cozy.

We think this approach leads to less desired products that gets hidden in cupboards and thrown away faster, and we would like to suggest a way to change this. To stop the invasion!

We suggest people all over the world working in product development to ask oneself four important questions:

1. Is this going to be desired by the customer?
2. What works in the context of usage?
3. What is the right aesthetics for a certain products function?
4. How not to add to all those huge landfills of garbage.

And we would all live in peace.

PS. Here’s one example we made of a non spaceship looking electric kettle.

  • Hannes.

    I think the real reason is poor leadership and a lack of competitive vision. Without vision there is no strategy to direct the design, find better talents

    • I think you are right in that there are several reasons in play here. I do agree with you, but also hope embracing the complexity of the situation might encourage people to act against this from their individual angles. Managers might provide visions, designers might provide good enough reasonings behind design decisions, and everyone (including go to market teams) must keep an open mind and let go of bad habits.

  • Stephan

    I think, I know why there are so many “space Invadors” in our homes.
    The designers just follow the marketing aspect, that the customer’s wish is to have a new and up-to date product. The first impression is verry important here. All the manufacturer wants to make their product looking newer than a similar one in the supermarket-shelf, which ends up in these futuristic designs. This can be made easily through injection moulding and 2 colour contrast with 2 different kinds of plastics- that looks good in the ADs and the supermarket-shelfs.

    I think, that this design-movement has an impact on the customer, but it is just verry short-term impact:
    It is the moment when you have to decide to buy or not to buy.
    After that, the futuristic design has no use.

    It is just made to influence our decision-making-ability in the shopping centres.

    No body really needs these aerodynamic hand-mixers or a notebook, that only looks like it is fast. These designs are just increasing consumption of stuff that is made to break or useless after a while and, if you ask me, a kind of criminal.