(All pictures come from muji.com)
Tingyu Su
Intro to Design Studies
October 2, 2017
Initial Object Exploration
Description:
Muji’s 95 dollars “Insta Famous” Pop-up toaster is a perfect example to illustrate that products now have to appeal to be well-designed because otherwise no one is going to purchase them. It is a average sized toaster and weights 1.1 kg. It has a shape of rectangular prism, with a length of 25 centimeters, a width of 16.5 centimeters and a height of 19.5 centimeters. It can toast two slides at the same time. The grills and the plate that holds the bread crumbs underneath are made of silver metal. It has four stub legs below. Most importantly and most profitably, it is pure white. Like all its other products, Muji designed its toaster in white matte plastic as simple and plain as possible. On one side, there are two buttons, one says: “Defrost” and another says: “Cancel,” a lever and a round dial for temperature setting. People can toast bread both in room temperature level and frozen.
Ideas generated:
From this observation, I can see the trend that people now prefer items that has clean style, mostly just one color and fewer decorations or complex patterns. People also prefers matte textures somehow which reminds me of iPhones, because I do think that it is the iPhone which made matte texture this popular. We can notice this trend of liking simple designs not only from Muji, but also Ikea furnitures and App designs. Ikea really has simple color and style for almost all of their products to give people more choices because everything just looks so good and cozy together. Apples apps have been updated several times with new operating systems, and all the apps really played with 2D and 3D effects with simple color.
However, the balance between the outside beauty and the practical functions of a product is the issue I started to be concerned about. People are more likely to spend money on trend or aesthetic because of how a product looks but not the one that functions better. For example, there were bread crumbs falling into the Muji’s Pop-up toaster and cause smoke and smell, while causing people nearly a hundred dollars after tax. I am worried about what is going to happen in the future with this trend that is making things worse.
