Lenovo ThinkPad X300 compared to W700, to scale

Lenovo’s head honcho of design and Design Matters blogger David Hill was recently interviewed by a UI & design firm out of Australia. In the interview/podcast, Hill discusses a wide variety of topics around design and ThinkPads. I thought I’d heard it all when it came to ThinkPad design, but this is a very thorough interview and I came out knowing a few more things.

I’ve included my favorite Q&A below, but I highly recommend you read or listen to the whole thing. Enjoy!

Gerry:
You’ve been an advocate of – I think you’ve called it an “evolution design strategy”. Can you tell me what you mean by that and whether it’s at odds with the current trend towards sticking the word “innovation” on everything?

David:
… For many years we have been practicing what I call an evolution design strategy, which is specifically linked to ThinkPad. When I first took over the management responsibilities of the design of ThinkPad a lot of people asked me “So what are we going to do with the next generation design?” And my theory was if it wasn’t broken, I don’t really think we should fix it. I don’t think we need a new design. This was way back in 1995, when the design of ThinkPad was only three years old. And I didn’t think that we needed a new design, I just felt that we needed to continue to make it better and better.

This is very similar to the way many European car manufacturers have treated the design of their products. One that I use often is the Porsche 911. Every year somebody at Porsche is not trying to figure out what’s this year’s 911 going to look like. What they try to do is improve, enhance it and make the breed better and better and better. And I have always been a very strong advocate of that. And I think it’s connected to the ThinkPad brand. The word “think” obviously suggests thought and thoughtfulness and I think that means that the design had to have thought and thinking behind it. We shouldn’t do things arbitrarily, we should do them if we believe that the solution is truly better.

Source: [InfoDesign] via [Design Matters]