Product Design: Yellow Pencil
Dan Harden (president and chief designer, Whipsaw Inc)
Rob Strickler (designer, Whipsaw Inc)
Jennifer Morrill (CEO, Adiri)
Every so often a design comes along that redefines a product. The Natural Nurser is one such design. Created for Adiri by San Francisco-based design firm Whipsaw Inc, the Natural Nurser is a new kind of baby bottle. ‘The industry hadn’t seen anything innovative for quite some time and I had a hunch that an opportunity existed to create a breakthrough,’ says Dan Harden, president and chief designer of Whipsaw Inc. ‘It’s tough to transcend convention and do something totally new but utterly simple. That’s good design.’
The project came about when Jennifer Morrill, Adiri’s CEO, inherited the company from her father, who had created a patented breast-shaped bottle. ‘It didn’t really speak to our customers, which are mothers,’ she says. ‘It served a very important medical function for cleft-palate babies and premature infants, so hospitals and medical communities had heard of it and would use the bottle as a last resort with babies that wouldn’t transition from breast to bottle easily, but it wasn’t selling on a mass level. There were also a number of design flaws that even prevented me from using it myself, so I knew I was going to need to work on the design if I wanted to really make this business successful.’
Morrill began by making a wish list of possible design firms. ‘We had a list of things we were looking for and one of the major concerns was price, but at the same time we didn’t want a cost-effective design that wasn’t going to do a good job,’ she says. In Silicon Valley, where Morrill is based, most of the local design firms tend to concentrate primarily on electronics, so finding the right company was no easy task. Morrill had a contact at IDEO, but it wasn’t to be. ‘IDEO was way out of our league but, that said, we were looking at higher-end design firms because I really value quality and I had a certain amount of money that I was willing to pay.’
Although the two firms Morrill finally talked to had both designed a wide range of products, neither had done any work in the baby arena. But it was a meeting with Dan Harden at Whipsaw Inc that really captured Morrill’s attention. ‘One of the things Dan said in our interview was that he liked to try and imitate nature to the greatest extent possible,’ she recalls. ‘The other thing that really attracted me to Whipsaw was that Dan’s wife had been a lactation consultant for La Leche League [an organisation that encourages breastfeeding], so she was at the earlier meetings. I really liked her and got a sense that these were people I’d want to work with.’ Likewise, Harden was immediately impressed by Jennifer Morrill’s vision for her company.
The management team at Adiri was made up of three women, all mothers themselves, who wasted no time in heading out to poll hundreds of women, asking them what they were looking for in a baby bottle terms of design, colour and ease of use. They then took these specifications to Whipsaw as a brief. ‘Adiri came to us with a wish list, but most of the design problems and brief required research: specifically, how a baby latches on, ideal bottle nipple shape and size, flow rates, fill and feed tasks, cleaning methods, materials, and air control,’ continues Harden. ‘The client was involved from the very beginning and feedback and opinions about our concepts were essential in moving the process forward.’
Meanwhile, the team at Whipsaw were doing some market research of their own. Both Harden and designer Rob Strickler recall the comedic aspect of a job that saw of a group of 30-50-year-old guys sitting round a kitchen table drinking from baby bottles! ‘We really needed to sense what baby does when feeding, so we drank lots of chalky formula mixes, and even beer, out of many test models late at night,’ says Harden.
The Whipsaw team then set about creating and investigating a number of design concepts, before building and testing the most promising, working closely with the plastic supplier, toolmaker, and moulders in Taiwan to realise the design. ‘When it came to the choice of materials, there were limitations because only a certain number are both strong enough and soft enough and we really wanted the material to be soft, polycarbonate-free and to have a rigidity around the holding area,’ says Morrill. ‘We sat in meeting after meeting with our manufacturer, and then Dan came up with this over-mould design. There was a slight problem involved with the expense in using that much plastic but we did a lot of trade-offs.’
Morrill also worked closely with Rob Strickler at Whipsaw, who helped overcome some of the technical limitations to the design. ‘The key thing was to make it as simple to assemble and use and clean as possible,’ says Strickler. ‘Moulding the nipple onto the bottle saved us on the parts count and the complexity of the whole design. Then came the really long, involved process of actually trying to make it function. I was very surprised at how difficult a product made up of four plastic parts could be!’ One part of that process involved working on the valve at the bottom of the bottle. ‘That was a big physics issue – getting the right balance of air coming in and out, and also ensuring there were no leaks,’ recalls Morrill. ‘Our directive to the design team was to have the whole cap in one piece, so the little valve that you can actually remove would be built in – but we eventually realised it was not going to work as a one-piece design.’
This was a difficult realisation, as Adiri had already begun marketing the bottle as a ‘bottle and cap’ two-piece design. Although the final design has a two-piece cap, it is designed in such a way that the valve doesn’t have to be removed to clean it. Because the holes are big enough to allow water through, the cap can simply be placed in the dishwasher along with the rest of the bottle. Again Howden stepped in, this time with the notion of making the vent look beautiful; hence the Petal vent, now trademarked and patented. ‘That was a real breakthrough in the sense that this is actually a very cool design feature,’ explains Harden. ‘It’s very feminine, but not overly so, and the large holes also serve a very important function as they mean the valve really does clean itself when it’s in the dishwasher.’
Another major issue that had to be addressed was solved at the manufacturing rather than the design firm. ‘For me, one of the limitations in the process was that a lot of the issues were material issues and that wasn’t something that Whipsaw was particularly attuned to because this was a whole new area of plastics for them,’ says Morrill. ‘So we had issues around the flow of the bottle in terms of the “nipple”: how big should the hole be to get the different flows, what kind of manufacturing process should we use to pierce the holes? We actually moved from using a heated pin that was used to hand-pin each bottle to a laser, so we had to purchase a huge laser machine.’
‘I think that having more people involved with more experience with fluid dynamics would have been a help,’ comments Strickler. ‘Had we had more input earlier on, on what a challenge it was going to be to get it right, we could have moved more easily.’
In terms of budget, things worked a little differently to normal. Adiri worked ‘creatively’ with Whipsaw and agreed on a part-equity, part-royalty, part-fee structure in return for their design services. ‘They have done a lot of ongoing work for us without adding anything,’ says Morrill. ‘One of things I liked about Whipsaw over the other firms we looked at was that we negotiated a finite royalty with them, whereas a lot of firms were asking for indefinite royalties and that was just not acceptable to us.’
There were four main challenges when designing the bottle: innovation, materials and safety, venting and ease of use, all of which were addressed and overcome.
Innovation
One of the main objectives in designing the Natural Nurser lay with the fact that the design of baby bottles in general was flawed and in need of innovation. For the most part, baby bottles are all alike – hard polycarbonate bottles that fill from a small opening in the top by removing a threaded ring that holds a small silicone teat in place, and breathe via tiny holes. To a baby, this does not feel natural at all. Also, most baby bottles don’t ‘breathe’ correctly, which creates the bubbles that cause colic. The Whipsaw team aimed to solve all these problems.
Natural Nurser’s large, soft, pliable and realistic breast-like shape appeals instantly to a baby, encouraging proper feeding and, therefore, better nutrition. Every other baby bottle on the market has a small fill cap on the top, whereas Natural Nurser’s cap is on the bottom, so the ‘nipple’ and ‘breast’ can be large and continuous. The resulting design looks real without looking like a prosthetic device, thanks to its aesthetically appealing design.
Materials and safety
Another challenge was to formulate the right materials to offer human-like softness for the baby, the ability to over-mould into one part, resistance to heat (dishwasher, boiling), toughness (especially against biting), and safety (no polycarbonate). Polycarbonate, the most commonly used baby bottle material, releases a harmful chemical called Bisphenol A (BPA) when it is overheated or scraped, and BPA can cause female reproductive disorders.
The Natural Nurser is the safest bottle on the market today because it contains no polycarbonate and its forms are soft. There are no details on the bottle that can hurt the baby (most bottles have a hard cap ring right under the teat, and babies’ lips and noses are vulnerable). One of the key design innovations was the integration of soft and rigid plastic properties into one uniform part. Soft P-Flex plastic is over-moulded over a rigid polypropylene cylinder to make one integral part. This provides softness for the baby, combined with a bottle that is easy to hold and fill for the parent.
Venting
As milk is sucked out of the bottle, it creates a vacuum. Air needs to enter the space above the milk to prevent this vacuum from stopping the flow of milk or causing backflow bubbles. Most baby bottles have tiny holes that don’t work because they don’t admit enough air, while others have messy collapsing bags that attempt to address the vacuum problem. Tiny vent holes were not an option here, because the bottle dome is so large; the baby can push against it hard to get more milk, simulating real breast-feeding. This causes negative pressure behind the milk when the baby releases, so the design had to admit lots of air behind the milk.
Natural Nurser has a one-inch silicone diaphragm valve, similar in principle to a snorkel, that is integrated into the cap. This one-way valve lets air in freely to equalise pressure but will never allow fluid to leak out. The petal-shaped air holes in the cap behind the valve admit air, but are also designed to admit hot water to clean the underside of the valve so it does not need to be removed.
Ease of Use
One of the project’s primary challenges was to understand and solve usage problems, such as how a baby latches on, ideal nipple shape and size, regulating milk flow, fill-and-feed tasks, cleaning methods, and air control.
Fewer parts, a wide opening, and a smooth, flush inside make the Natural Nurser easy to clean, which is very important for a baby bottle. This simplicity is due to the single over-moulded main bottle. The cover, which extends over the whole bottle, keeps it clean during transport, and even fits in a car cup holder. The number of holes in the nipple determine the milk flow rate, and these can increase as the baby starts to grow. The Natural Nurser comes in three flow rates, indicated by a colour system: pure white low flow for newborns; gentle blue-purple medium flow for those aged six months to a year; and active orange for high-flow one- to two-year-olds.
Designing the Natural Nurser was a steep learning curve for client and creative alike, but perhaps its success lies, in part, with their enthusiasm, openness and ability to learn from each other. ‘In the beginning, I was as optimistic as you can be and thought the process would go smoothly from beginning to end. I didn’t build in any room for the inevitable issues that came up along the way,’ says Morrill. ‘If I were to repeat the process I would not have gone out there and started selling the product in a certain way before the design was finished. I had no experience and was a bit naïve. It’s not so much about the design process as about the business side of things: understanding that it’s a long process and not making commitments around what you think is going to come out of it, being flexible around the process.’
Although Harden wouldn’t change anything specifically, he has also learned from the project. ‘In general, I think designers could be more empathetic in their approach to solving universal design problems like this. They need to experience for themselves the difficulties, pain, and frustration that people often have when interacting with everyday objects,’ he says. ‘Designers, and our society, get excited by the newest sexy innovation, but usually don’t apply enough thought to solving the tough utilitarian problems. Just look around! There are so many products out there with dubious functionality and poor interface. Products have become “sweet” – they taste good, but aren’t nutritious. It takes lots of user research, testing, open-mindedness and patience to nail a good universal design like Natural Nurser.’
The product continues to sell well and follow-up baby products are already in the works. What was once a floundering, specialist product has not only reached the mass market but has done so with award-winning success. Currently, around 100,000 bottles are sold per month, and Adiri is expected to grow 12-fold in 2008, due solely to the sales of Natural Nurser. In fact, demand is so high that there is a current back order and more production tools are being made to meet the high demand. ‘People have suggested that now the product is a success we might want to go with IDEO or one of these big firms, but I wouldn’t leave Dan because he and the Whipsaw team are such an integral part of our success,’ says Morrill. The Natural Nurser has featured in the New York Times, Metropolis, USA Today and on NPR, and can also be found in the Pasadena Museum of California Art. ‘I still cannot believe that this baby bottle that my father had invented and that he’d spent all these years agonising over has finally been turned into something that is sitting in a museum,’ says Morrill. ‘That, to me, is the most memorable part of the project.’
‘I have designed everything from tampons to supercomputers but a baby bottle, although it looks simple, is a tough design problem,’ concludes Harden. ‘The user will not reason with you, cannot tell you what they is looking for, and will throw your design at you if they don’t like it. Furthermore, products that support essential human needs, like sleeping, bathing, or feeding from a bottle, demand to be perfect, functionally and aesthetically. People don’t want design to get in the way, especially between a baby and its mother.
‘Most design problems, regardless of the product, share a common denominator: manipulating matter to create an experience that is positive or fulfilling in some way. The key is having the insight to see unique combinations that others don’t, or to get there first. I was determined to do just that on Adiri’s baby bottle.’