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Online vote to aid product design

If Kohei Nishiyama’s wishes are granted, he will be financially independent by the age of 40, living as an inventor and being woken each morning by his robot dog. But the 37-year-old Tokyo-based designer and founder of Elephant Design has a more ambitious dream, one he hopes will change the face of shopping.

He wants to empty the shelves of dreary, mass-marketed and mass-produced objects and replace them with products that we — the people — have helped to develop. Mr. Nishiyama calls his idea “Design to Order” and the principle is simple. Anyone with a unique idea, for anything from a robotic web camera to a magnetic bathroom mirror, posts an image and description on his website. There, people can log on to suggest alterations and improvements to the design. If enough people vote for the product, he makes a deal with a manufacturer and the product is made.

“There are so many mass-produced products making it on to the shelves because that’s how large companies do things. Our idea is to give people what they want by involving anyone who has a good idea early on in the process,” says Mr. Nishiyama. “There are a lot of people who have great ideas but they’re not working in the business.”

The scheme has been running in Japan for a few years, and has taken off among designers who use it to float ideas instead of committing to something that may flop. The company has recently set up a test site with retailer Muji to help develop products for its stores. One idea, for transparent sticky memos, was suggested by a 21-year-old student and will be marketed next month. She stands to get royalties from every pack sold.

Earlier this year, Mr. Nishiyama appointed London-based designers The Division as the first British consultancy to feed into the project, ahead of a formal U.K. launch. The company has submitted three designs to Mr. Nishiyama’s test site at www.cuusoo.jp/muji, including a clock that is vague about the time, a set of solar-powered, glowing garden furniture, and a wastepaper bin that tidies ugly cables around work desks.

David Tonge, founder of The Division, said, “Our thinking with the clock was that mostly these are at work to measure people’s efficiency and people are watched clocking in and clocking out. We wanted something more relaxed for the home, so the hour hand is on the outside, and like a sundial it’s fairly vague. But in the centre, it displays minutes in a digital form so you can use it if you’re doing something like cooking pasta for 13 minutes.”

“Because it’s a new thing and it’s experimental, a lot of people are posting ideas and, it has to be said, some of them are utterly rubbish,” says Mr. Tonge. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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