Design and innovation...the Russian way

When you think of Russia, sleek and innovative design isn't the first thing that springs to mind (at least for the British reader). Russia conjures up images of dilapidated, grey, bleak tower blocks, rusty old Ladas and crumbling nuclear power plants. Then I came across this Moscow based design studio led by Artem Lebedev that comes up with imaginative, ground-breaking yet simple, beautiful and sometimes humourous products. Just take a look at these things.

OK take, for example, the TV remote "Pultius" with 100 buttons. At first this design may seem ridiculous as it's almost 50cm long and you'll probably be thinking that you can just use the up and down button to flick between channels. However, the design does have some merit. Say you want to flick from channel 100 to 52 with just one hand. I know that on my TV back home I have serious issues with this maneuver as I can't do it quick enough just by pressing the individual buttons. I always land up on channel 5 rather than 52.

It's not all fun and games in their office though. The team have come up with a truly spectacular computer keyboard "Optimus Maximus" which has an individual display on each key. What this means is that when you press the shift key, for example, the displays on the individual keys change to upper case letters. Switching to a Cyrillic keyboard for all us Russian students would be very simple. If you want to have the letter Z where the escape button is, no problem. A custom made keyboard in the blink of an eye. In the original design for the keyboard the display actually covered the entire key, but the size of the display seems to have been reduced on the final product which is currently being manufactured.

Artem Lebedev and his team also take a lively interest in typography. I first saw the book "книга про букбы от Аа до Яя" (Book of Letters from Aa to Яя) in the Russian magazine Afisha about a year ago. The book is a sort of designer's guidebook to the history, construction and visual rhymes of every letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. The author Yuri Gordon sums it up nicely by saying "this book is about each of the 33 letters of our imperfect alphabet as an individual personality". You can click on the PDF link on the book's page to get a preview. All exciting stuff.

Created: 2007-10-09 22:36, Tags: design, innovation, inspiration, Russia, stuff, Comments: 1