What Makes Motorola's Designers Tick

What Makes Motorolas Designers Tick
Industrial designers are an interesting breed.

They see the world in a way that most of us can scarcely imagine and render complex ideas in simple and fun forms.

I was reminded of this on the night of June 8 at an event in New York hosted by Motorola, where I spent a good two hours chatting about wireless phone design with two guys who do it better than anyone else currently, Motorola's chief designer, Jim Wicks, and Peter Pfanner, head of the company's North American design operations.

These are the guys who came up with Motorola's smash hit RAZR (razor) phone, and they were in town to help their employer start hyping two new wireless-phone models, the PEBL (pebble) and SLVR (sliver).

Get them talking shop, however, and they don't talk about what a phone can do or how many famous people use it (former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was photographed using a RAZR phone), but rather how people react to it.

What gets them excited is unwittingly creating a new gesture.

Pfanner fished into a pocket for his own RAZR phone to explain what he meant.

With the phone closed, he demonstrated how easy it is to open and close with one hand--flick the top portion up with your thumb and then close it again with the thumb.

There's something about the tactile sensation that makes this action something you want to do