99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-04- 99% Details

Episode Date: September 24, 2010

It’s a stick with bristles poking out of it. It doesn’t even qualify as a simple machine, but the careful thought and design that went into the creation of the modern, angled bristle, fat handled toothbrush shows just how much … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21centry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The details are not the details. They make the design. At John Edson, that's what he said.

Quoting legendary designer Charles Eams. Express, test, and cycle. I'm John Edson, president of Lunar. Express, test, and cycle. There's a conception in the public, I think, that design is a lot about making things pretty. That's shifting, I think. There's a big DIY movement and maker movement, and people are getting a better sense of how things come to be. We've always known how kind of buildings came to be, because we'd watch them go up.

But products just kind of appear on the store shelf from somewhere, from China, right? But I really love the process of design and love bringing things to life, express, test, and cycle. The story that I want to tell about the details I wanted to product make is about a toothbrush. But there's a bit of a conflict of interest, or at least the perception of one,

that requires a disclaimer. So I asked Matt Martin to kalealeW to help me out. What matters to me, Roman, is that you are completely open about the fact that John Edson is the president of Bluner. Lunar underwrites these segments, but at the same time, you've got complete editorial control over how 99% of visible sounds. So what do you think you're going to say? Well, I'll think of something. You know what he said. This is the story of a toothbrush.

Express. Expressing is getting a design out there in the world in a prototype form so that other people can look at it. And you can test it, you can evaluate it, and then you can decide what you're gonna do next. And cycle. And it really is this kind of forced evolutionary process. So the toothbrush company came to lunar

with what John Edson calls a make-pretty exercise. Make-pretty exercise. That's not really innovation. Our instinct was to ask them, well, how do people hold toothbrushes? But the toothbrush company didn't actually know this. So we engaged a hand-caneseologist. That's somebody who knows how people hold stuff.

It turns out there are five common toothbrush grips. And in the meantime, our designers went out and bought every toothbrush under the sun. And we started to take the conventional flat toothbrush with brussels sticking up out of it. And we used a heat gun and made a bunch of different prototypes. We just bent.

Express. Those standard brushes into different shapes to see fundamentally what was working and what was not working. Test. Hundreds of sketches and dozens of prototypes. It's like one of the first things we found when we were molding our prototypes was that,

at the time, the reach toothbrush was probably best known as the most ergonomic toothbrush. This was all perception. It was only ergonomic in that it looked like a dental tool. And it was a dental tool that somebody else would use on you, the crook and the dental mirror. It's so that somebody can stick it in your mouth and manipulate it so they can see around your teeth. But the reach toothbrush, if you use it yourself, you end up with your hand back at your ear. So scrap the bend, straight handle is better.

One of the things we found was a fatter toothbrush handle is more comfortable. So fat is better than thin, but at some point in the process, someone at the toothbrush company said, wait a minute, we can't ship a toothbrush that's got a fat handle on it like that, because it's not gonna fit into those 1950s style ceramic toothbrush holders that people have stuck to their walls

Part of their houses, right? But this turned out to be a good thing for the toothbrush malongers. They got a ton of press about it Oh, here's the toothbrush. It doesn't fit and Lunar came up with a strategy if anybody called to complain We created this little nickel-plated stand. They just send out this $5 component. Just like biological evolution, sure the organism adapts to the environment, but also the environment adapts to the organism. And now if you buy a toothbrush holder, it's going to have these gigantic holes in the top, right? So you can fit these new fangled toothbrushes in them.

Future-oriented. In addition to the straight and fat handles, the new toothbrush also had criss-cross bristles. Angled bristles. That was brand new. The handle was strategically flattened in parts to help you orient it. Your fingers know which way the bristles are pointed in your mouth. And it accommodated all of the five brushing grips identified by the kinesiologist. There's a spoon grip.

There's the death grip. More women than men use the death grip. When I asked John Etzen which was his favorite innovation in the toothbrush, he named something that most people will consider a lack of design or innovation, just getting the toothbrush back to having a straight handle. It's not trying to do anything crazy through the neck. That's the best shape, really. You know, those kind of, duh, innovations.

And that's a big part of design. The thing you don't think about or notice notice probably had the most thought put into it. 99% Invisible is produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. Find out more at 99%invisible.org. visit bold.org.