120 years ago, cars and planes were state of the art technology.

Lightbulbs slowly replaced candle and gas lighting in city factories and shops, allowing them to operate through the night for the first time.

Ask any trade professional who regularly relies on power tools which cordless drill/driver is best and they'll probably say Milwaukee, DeWalt or Makita.

All of these brands offer great tooling solutions, as well as Bosch, Rigid and Ryobi, but Milwaukee Tools often appear at the top in terms of revenue and market share in North America.

Velcro was inspired by burrs, which are seeds or dry fruits that have small spikes on them.

In the 1940s, George de Mestral took his dog, Milka, for a walk in the Alps. Burdock seeds (burrs) clung to his socks, coat and to Milka's fur. He wondered why this happened and observed the seeds through a microscope.

Wilson footballs have been used to score each point in the NFL since 1941.

NFL footballs are handmade at Wilson's Football Factory in Ohio. There are 25 steps to make each NFL football with around 50 people as part of the process. Each football meets the same specs: 71cm long, 55cm at the widest point and weighing 425 grams.

Two shower curtains sealed together formed the first bubble wrap prototype. This was going to be the next, trendy wallpaper.

No one thought Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes's 1957 wallpaper concept would take off, so they rebranded it as greenhouse insulation. It served its purpose well, but it wasn't the groundbreaking success they thought they had.

The mid-1700s weren't just a time for American independence, it was also an important time for mashed potatoes.

Mashed potato dishes certainly existed before their first appearance in a cookbook by Hannah Glasse in 1747. In 1771, a French army pharmacist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, is thought to have popularized potato dishes in France. This influence spread to other parts of Europe and eventually the United States.

10,000 hours of watching YouTube tutorials on how to sketch doesn't replace 10,000 hours of practice.

Consuming good direction helps to create. Mindlessly sketching every day without worrying about perspective won't improve anyone's abilities much. Yet, sketching with good advice in mind will.

People avoided the first shopping carts designed by Piggly Wiggly owner, Sylvan Goldman, in 1940.

It was a foldable, double-decker carriage that used two removable wire baskets placed on a wooden frame with wheels. People thought it looked like a baby stroller, so they continued using hand baskets.

Forks weren't used by "proper" Europeans until around the 16th Century when an Italian cookbook included them.

Umbrellas were seen as impractical and effeminate in England until Jonas Hanway began confidently using one in the 18th Century.

Designers don't always directly solve problems for users. Often times they create better tools for users to more effectively engage with tasks and challenges.

Trust relies on familiarity.

And you won't be familiar without showing up regularly.

Sketching 100 ideas can be a helpful rule of thumb for generating 1 good design direction.

The train of thought is this:

- The first few dozen ideas are probably obvious ones.

- The next few dozen are less common.

- As you get to the last dozen, you're likely sketching unique, specific solutions.

The Apple Vision Pro promises to revolutionize our interaction with the digital world.

This post touches on its hardware in relation to Industrial Design principles. There are plenty of articles and videos covering more information about the Vision Pro, I've linked some at the bottom.

Ideas kept in your head are Schrodinger's concepts —both promising and inert.

An internalized idea is only a passing thought.

Limited functionality is the most common complaint against Meta's smartglasses and Humane's AI Pin despite that being the core appeal.

It's frustrating to face screens for +8 hours a day and to feel glued to TikTok passed midnight when you should be sleeping. Some people make the effort to distance themselves with social media. They deactivate Facebook and delete the apps for a month. The trouble is that the possibility to scroll is still available, you still have the phone. It's easy to reinstall Reddit.

"Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn't."

-IBM

Selfie sticks used to be known as a joke design, known as a Chindogu.

"Chindogu" translates from Japanese to "strange tool." These designs aim to solve a single problem while ignoring other problems they cause. Shoe umbrellas, a chopstick fan and butter stick are probably the most popular examples.

People used to get burned regularly from a flat iron, or sad iron, heated on a stovetop.

Other methods to flatten out cloth with a hot surface existed first, such as smoothing stones or hot charcoal in metal pans. But flat irons became the popular method around the 1500s.