Product Innovation
The Hollington consultancy has worked with many influential client organisations and brands, helping to create innovative new products that make a significant impact on existing markets, or build new ones. Some of these products are shown below; click on an image for a larger version. There is also an archive of earlier Hollington products.
News
Hollington was one of four design consulting firms chosen to develop innovative products to help fight infection in hospitals. The Design Bugs Out challenge was laid down by the Design Council on behalf of the UK National Health Service (NHS). To form a designer-manufacturer team, Geoff worked with the international division of US-based Herman Miller, a company with a long tradition in innovative solutions for healthcare environments.
The Hollington product — a Patient Bedside System plus an over-bed table — is designed for easy cleaning and improved 'patient empowerment': patients can more easily access and manage their own stuff, reducing the need for staff or visitor intervention and thus the risk of infection spread.
Prototypes of the Hollington system are currently being evaluated in the UK and in the United States.
Consulting Gallery
> Working with US-based office furniture giant Herman Miller, Geoff designed the Hollington Chair, introduced in 1998. An office work chair for professionals, the product belies its engineered, mechanical nature by being essentially non-mechanical in appearance. There are no exposed screws or fasteners of any kind, and the forms are organic and non-technical. The comfort and ergonomics are designed to enable informal postures — for sideways sitting and lounging — in recognition of real-life working behaviour.
> Kodak cameras were selling less well in Europe than in the US, so Hollington were asked to re-imagine the Kodak consumer camera product as a more urbane and worldly thing. The new designs (T570 and T700) were given the kind of fine detail that exemplifies accurate, high-quality manufacture. The products' surfaces the contours, shut-lines, textures, fasteners and printed graphics were lovingly detailed. Fellow consultants Barron Gould (also now Geoff's partners in BGH) designed and developed the soft green and silver colour, material and finish language.
> Parker Pen's brief for the Sonnet family was for a product that could become the Parker pen — a timeless icon that would have staying power in the market place. It became clear that balance and proportion are eighty percent of what makes a successful pen design, so the build up of parts was painstakingly orchestrated to avoid the kinds of massive gaps and overhangs that compromise the profiles of many capped pens. The legendary Parker arrow-shaped clip — a feature that is at once both a functional part and a logo — was redesigned and the fountain pen nib and its feed (the black plastic bit on the back) received a huge amount of attention (we made 10-times larger than life models of both clip and nib assembly). Sonnet is still a best-selling product after more than twenty years, so that probably does make it a classic. In this interview Geoff talks about his work with Parker.
> VuTable (say "view-table") was a design exploration with Herman Miller International, based in the UK. The idea was for a home office desk of the future. Really it's no longer much of a desk, with just two small tablets for a cup of coffee, a notepad and maybe a cordless keyboard. A large, inwardly curved, vertical surface incorporates a large widescreen display, cameras and speakers and gives the user some sense of enclosure and protection. The computer system may have gesture input (shades of Minority Report). So the 'desk' becomes mainly a vertical thing.
> Created for Design Ideas, a US company based near Chicago, these Trumpet flower vases have a rubber base that makes filling them at the kitchen sink a more comfortable experience than is usual with glass. There are crystal clear, white- and green-frosted variants — and each carries an inscription: "Pardon is the choicest flower of victory". The idea for this aphorism, that a product could incorporate a textual 'component', came from a trip to Tokyo where so many products carried weird, and to native English speakers, meaningless phrases: things like "Significant girls promote eager subjects in the world".
> Parker 100 is a contemporary flagship for the brand. The design celebrates a 20th Century design classic — the Parker 51 — but is a very different kind of product. 51 was a small pen with a plastic barrel, dating from a time when fountain pens — wet ink-refillable — were still state of the art for letter-writing and form-filling; the ball point pen hadn't yet been invented. It was a workhorse, albeit a rather beautiful one. Today there are dozens of writing technologies, not to mention the computer printer, so to use a fountain pen is to make a choice — for a writing experience, for quality, and for a better looking script on the page. Which is why Parker 100 is a generous-sized, metal-bodied, high quality instrument, designed for the pleasure of ownership and use. In this interview Geoff talks about his work with Parker.
> Developed and designed with Chris Glaister and Duncan Turner of Je Joue, SaSi is an intelligent massager with learning ability. A motor-driven tracked ball rolls below a silicon TPE membrane to create a range of straight and curved movements controlled by a microprocessor. Voted Cosmopolitan Ultimate Toy for 2009.