1999 IBO Design Awards See Growing Emphasis on Product Design.

The commitment to quality industrial design is gaining strength in the analytical instruments industry. It was evident in the comments of those involved in the creation of the winners of IBO's sixth annual design awards, and the same commitment is strongly illustrated by the winning instruments themselves.

The 1999 IBO Gold Award for excellence in design of analytical instruments goes to Analytical Spectral Devices, Inc. for the LabSpec Pro portable NIR spectrophotometer. The Silver Award goes to Perkin Elmer/Sciex for the Elan 6100 DRC ICP-MS. The Bronze Award goes to MISCO for its Digital Fiberoptic Refractometer.

To be eligible, a product must be an analytical instrument that began initial shipping between August 31, 1998 and July 31, 1999. Candidates for the awards are chosen from a large pool of products that IBO accumulates by attendance at dozens of trade shows, closely watching trade publications and monitoring product introductions in the industry. The awards are based on innovative industrial design with an emphasis on esthetics, ergonomics and the ways in which creative design improves functionality and the usefulness of a product to the end user. IBO does not operate or test these instruments or evaluate their technical capabilities and these awards should not be considered an endorsement of the technical performance of the products. Since some instruments present greater design challenges than others, the difficulty of the technology is one factor considered in the selection of winners.

This year's winners are very different technologies and bear little resemblance to each other. One thing they have in common, though, is that while all three designs represent major departures from the norm in their respective technologies, each design was strongly influenced by the need to function in a new way. In each case, the new design added esthetic interest and made the product more pleasant to be around, but it also improved the usefulness of the instrument in purely practical, non-emotional ways.

It is also interesting to note that all three of these products include significant technological improvements that were not considered in the design award selection process. But as the IBO design awards have shown in years past, and as this year's winners reconfirm, technological innovation and design excellence tend to go hand in hand. Given this, it is not surprising that past IBO design award winners have tended to perform very well in the marketplace.

The LabSpec Pro is a brilliant marriage of form and function. The instrument's sleek shape and polished aluminum face are a radical departure from the run-of-the-mill spectrometer. The power of its design is in its simplicity, a striking combination of classic line, proportion and texture that combine to make up what may be the first laboratory instrument you can actually call elegant with a straight face.

Unlike most similar instruments that are either "lab" or "field" instruments, the LabSpec Pro can go to either environment with equal ease. In the lab it occupies a fraction of the bench-space of the typical spectrometer, standing upright on a base that is only eight inches wide. But with its built-in handle, the instrument just as easily can go outside the lab.

"It is simply amazing, in today's world of seventy-five pound spectrometers, that the LabSpec Pro can be picked up by any technician and moved to another location without a cart or assistance from a coworker," says John Enterline, ASDI's director of sales and marketing. "We even designed a 'carrier' that will hold a laptop computer and all the accessories for easy transportation outside the lab."

Mr. Enterline claims that the LabSPec Pro has performance to match its go-anywhere design and it will operate equally well in the field or the lab. "Our product can be used upright, on its side, you can even shake it over your head, and it will still work with laboratory accuracy." Mr. Enterline is also eager to point out that some competitive spectrometers won't operate properly if they are merely tilted.

Mr. Enterline told IBO, "From the start, design was very important for the LabSpec Pro. We spent a lot of time talking to researchers and validating our findings in focus groups...The product has to look at home in the lab and not like your typical portable instrument...Everywhere we show the product, people rave about the design and how our instrument compares to the typical spectrometer."

It was the need for functional innovation that also drove the Perkin Elmer/Sciex team that designed the Elan 6100 DRC. It's not hard to understand how the streamlined look of the system prompted a lot of jokes about the instruments low drag coefficient. But despite a striking look that has turned lots of heads at trade shows (That's an ICP-MS?), the aerodynamic-looking shell of the system is actually a result of a practical as well as artistic consideration. According to Dr. Denoyer, "We don't want our customers to be putting bottles of solutions on the hood [of the instrument]. It's not a smart thing to do. We wanted sloped surfaces where you would never put a bottle."

Dr. Denoyer says the Elan design team decided to get creative and "take it to the next generation and set a look for where instrumentation is going."

What allowed them to do that were some tools that weren't available until recently. The Elan was designed with CAD-CAM systems that allowed a rapid prototyping approach to development.

"These rapid prototyping tools allow you to very quickly test a design and shape to see a) how it works ergonomically, and b) whether the form does the function. In the past if we had done a design like this we would have gone through a lot of heartache. [When] the first design...doesn't work, [you say] well, we just blew fifty thousand yesterday trying this," Dr Denoyer told IBO.

Another important component of the new Elan's design was made possible by advances in materials sciences. Dr. Denoyer said, "The cover on this new DRC is made out of kydex...It gave us the shape, but also it gave us the material we wanted. One of the principal design elements of the DRC is wherever possible to use materials that are compatible with cleanroom operation. Typically in the past, instruments had been made of formed metal boxes. If you look at the genesis, for example, of the Elan product line, we started with literally square boxes put together with some handles and hinges. Then we went to some parts [made of] plastic, then we starting bending the metal so we got to non-square metal, then we added urethane foam noses and so forth. And finally we're at a point where the actual hood is all out of chemically resistant kydex."

The MISCO Digital Fiberoptic Refractometer looks like a cross between a TV remote control and a magic wand. Again, the form of the instrument was dictated by a combination of functional and aesthetic concerns. One of the goals the MISCO designers set out to accomplish was to create an instrument whose use would be apparent simply from the way it looked.

Mike Raner, vice president of MISCO, said, "The trend in scientific instruments right now is moving toward 'dip-and-read' type measurement devices like the conductivity meter [and] the pH meter. They all have digital dip and read type instruments, but no one's ever made one for a refractometer. So...we wanted to make an instrument to address a 'dip-and-read' type market. We wanted to have a unique and high-tech appearance. We wanted it to look different than any other refractometer available on the market," Mr. Rainer said.

As IBO went through the design award process this year for the sixth time, one thing became clear: the attitude toward industrial design in the analytical instruments industry has changed in a very fundamental way. This was apparent not only from the winning designs, but from other companies who are likewise producing innovative and interesting designs such as the new EDX-700/800 EDXRF from Spectro and the Autoplus UV dissolution system from Hanson Research. There were also many products that, while not instruments, are closely tied to the instruments industry and show outstanding design, such as the Proto COL LCD from Synoptics Ltd and the PL-ELS 1000 light scattering detector from Polymer Laboratories.

There is clearly a correlation between the degree to which a product's market has been "commoditized" and the general quality of design. For example, there are very well designed lines of pH meters now coming from several companies including Beckman Coulter, Hach and Orion.

Not that instrument companies in general have suddenly become a Mecca for cutting-edge industrial designers- far from it. But there is change afoot. There still exists the axiomatic notion that has existed from the industry's inception that states that design is at best a minor concern for instruments, since they are marketed to scientists who are, by nature and training, immune to the siren seductions of esthetic form. But that attitude now appears to be less prevalent.

And, when faced with the idea that design is trivial to an instrument product's success, those associated with this years winning designs bristle. Mr. Rainer says, "I strongly disagree with that...Engineers are the people who are buying and specifying our instrument, but when they're not engineers they're also consumers. They're in K-Mart and Wal-Mart and they're looking at trends in appliance design and automotive design and other industrial designs for consumer tech products, and they have an eye for that and it carries over into their professional careers."

Dr. Denoyer says, "This surprises a lot of people-it sometimes surprises management-but we don't sell to droids, we sell to humans. And there is a large emotional component to the purchase of an instrument. I would say most of the emotional component has to do with a concern with expending a relatively large amount of your company's money on the right choice...And that's a pretty emotional situation to be in. It tests your character, it tests your skills, your colleagues and management are watching you...This is a career-determining decision for a lot of our customers. So there is already an emotional component in it, and whenever there is any emotional component in it there is no reason why you wouldn't want to make the interaction of the person with the equipment as pleasant as possible."

Perhaps the strongest statement came from Mr. Enterline: "It has always been my opinion that the analytical instruments industry has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to product design. In this day and age it is simply amazing to attend Pittcon and still see bent sheet metal boxes with toggle switches. Scientists will tell you that design is not important, it's the performance of the instrument that counts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Performance is important, but design will get you the order...I know I am a little biased when I talk about LabSpec Pro, but I truly believe we have shaken up a sleeping industry."

In earlier years those who championed design were mavericks in the industry. No more. Now there is a sense that the poor quality of design that still prevails in most instrument products is not so much due to a of lack of interest in quality design, but it is now a lack of knowledge and experience in achieving quality. Having neglected it so long, the industry now appears to want the benefits of good design and must now begin to figure out how to attain it. As they do so, they would do well to study the examples offered by this year's IBO Design Award winners.

Photograph: The LabSpec Pro NIR Spectrophotometer from Analytical Spectral Devices

Photograph: The Elan 6100 DRC ICP-MS system from Perkin Elmer/Sciex Photograph: The Digital Fiberoptic Refractometer from MISCO