Exclusive: Meet the Adam designer

An alumnus of the National Institute of Design, Makarand Kulkarni is a visiting faculty member at NID's R&D campus, where the founders of Notion Ink contacted him last year to design the look and feel of their tablet. He speaks about the challenges he faced in defying mainstream design trends while crafting a device that would be tactile, intuitive, and rewarding.

Share with us your career path as an industrial designer, and how did the Adam come about?

Adam came about when Rohan was looking for the correct design intervention for the product. The R&D campus of the National Institute of Design, where I teach as visiting faculty put him in touch with me. I have been designing for an automotive manufacturer for about 10 years and had very much made the transition from an industrial designer to an automotive stylist by all means. The exposure in the automotive industry has been a big one and I specialized in the art of looking at potential trends and translating them into well styled and well engineered products. I guess this is what remains important to the business of design when most of the functional needs are taken care of. Our firm Ether Design believes that understanding the customer is critical to all design thinking. It is also slowly but surely emerging as a big area of interest for both marketers and designers across businesses. We are only one and a half years in the design services business but have some top companies on our client list right from automotive to packaging.

We're going to see a lot of tablets getting launched this year, and it's is an emerging form factor for computing whose time has come; . How different is a tablet from a netbook, a laptop, a PC - the traditional computing experience? 
Everyone has been trying to define this new category and there has been great enthusiasm and a whole lot of apprehensions especially after the iPad. I think that we were moving from smartphones to even larger smartphones with touchscreens, and tablets had to fill in the big gap between the smartphones and laptops. I guess the tablet like all great ideas was thought over the pot while reading the newspaper on the smartphone! In the end, a tablet is a form factor for content and communication. It's a format which redefines mobility. This is where Adam has a distinct edge. It appreciates the seriousness of the reading/surfing activity.

The current buzz around Notion Ink's Adam is largely fueled by geeks and techno-fetishists. Was the product designed to cater to this particular demographic? How does one create a product that appeals to this niche, as well as a universal audience?

The enthusiasts always show the path! It’s extremely heartening that the geeks love it. By the time the product hits the market, the universal audience will also be tuned in. Actually, the patterns of usage will differentiate the audiences. In that light, the interface and application guys have a tougher task. As for the form factor I think we have perhaps hit a sweet spot by having a sleek thing but very rich in detail instead of making a generic minimalistic box open to interpretation! I am sure our automotive background played a major role here.

To a large extent, current design trends around touch based devices have been centred around software, with the external features being tempered down to be as minimalistic as possible. Tell us more about the parameters, approach, and thought processes that went into conceiving the design for Adam.

Ah, so many nice words for what I just called a box! I refuse to believe that minimalism is the only trend. It appears to be so because all of us love Apple so much that most people copy!! We had an extensive design survey and analysis and have identified many more trends as ‘happening’. After a lot of deliberation and hundreds of concepts we decided that we need to have a very sleek and at the same time a very personal style for the Adam. We were fortunate to have the NI team buying in without any signs of fear or doubt.We did evolve the form around something very handy almost like a spiral bound notebook.

It can record lectures while taking notes, and is a key differentiator from other tablet devices. Tell us more about your role in designing the swivel camera:

Notion Ink was very clear that they want to have a camera that works on both sides of the product, I mean the front and the rear. We gave it a complete analog rotation and integrated it into the spine of the Adam. It fit in so well that nobody wanted to go back on that despite complications in engineering it.

How did you, with the Adam, approach the challenge of making the hardware tactile, intuitive, rewarding.

Well the spiral book is very intuitive. Metaphorical approach to form always gives this quality to the overall design.We have spent a lot of time in figuring out the details. The character is kept rich and inviting. The buttons, their locations, the camera, the hexagon mesh – everything will be engaging you to explore the product in all its physical reality.

What are your top 5 personal favourite CE products in terms of design. And inversely, what key features/products do you ascribe bad design to? #
Those would be the iPhone, it changed everything! I love the Nokia Prism and its variants. Also liked the Motorola Razr when it was in vogue. I worship Phillipe Starck and Ross Lovegrove for their design work!

What according to you, is good design, and what is your personal approach and worldview around it.
That’s a tough one. Why should you really try to define? That way it becomes too general, and stylists like me want a very personal approach. I do believe that the product should carry the imprint of the designer and his understanding of the user/customer. Good design should create a unique identity for the product.