The iconic IBM selectric typewriter turned 50 years old on July 31 2011 and continues to make appearances on the Emmy-nominated show Mad Men. More so, it continues to stand out as a much loved, and universally recognizable icon of an era.

The IBM ® Selectric typewriter was a radical innovation that completely disrupted the business typewriter market. It transformed the speed, accuracy and flexibility with which people could generate the written word, and helped pave the way for the use of typewriter keyboards as the primary method for humans to interact with computers.

The Selectric typewriter, launched in 1961, was an overnight hit. “Sales of [the Selectric] in the first 30 days exceeded the forecast for six months. We figured in our branch office that we’d sell 50 or 60 and sold 500 to 600,” IBM salesman John Vinlove told USA Today in 1986 for a story about the typewriter’s 25th anniversary. The manufacturing facility expected to make 20,000 Selectric typewriters in its first year. By the end of 1961, they had orders for 80,000. And by 1986, more than 13 million Selectric typewriters had been sold. For more than 25 years, the Selectric was the typewriter found on most office desks.

With 2800 parts, many designed from scratch, the Selectric was a radical departure even for IBM, which had been in the typewriter business since the 1930s and was already a market leader. It took seven years to work out the manufacturing and design challenges before the first Selectric was ready for sale.

At the physical heart of the Selectric typewriter’s innovation was a golf-ball-shaped type head that replaced the conventional typewriter’s basket of type bars. The design eliminated the bane of rapid typing: jammed type bars. And with no bars to jam, typists’ speed and productivity soared.

The golf ball typing element was designed by an engineering team led by Horace “Bud” Beattie. The team members, according to a 1961 advertisement for the Selectric, “began their search by forgetting the past fifty years of typewriter design.” The first type head design had been shaped more like a mushroom, but under Beattie’s direction, IBM engineer John Hickerson revised the type head toward its ultimate spherical configuration. 

One other innovation in the design—a changeable typeface—was borrowed from a turn-of-the-century model, the Blickensderfer typewriter. Although it is not documented, it is believed that the Selectric name was inspired by adding this changeable typeface selection to an electric typewriter. By making the golf ball interchangeable, the Selectric enabled different fonts, including italics, scientific notation and other languages, to be swapped in. With the addition in 1964 of a magnetic tape system for storing characters, the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) model became the first, albeit analog, word-processor device.

The aesthetic design of the Selectric was the responsibility of Eliot Noyes, an architect and industrial designer who served as consulting design director to IBM for 21 years. The elegant, curvaceous form he created followed the Selectric typewriter’s distinctive function: the golf ball, which moved across the page, eliminated the traditional carriage return. That enabled the Selectric to operate in a smaller footprint and opened up possibilities for a new profile. For the Selectric, Noyes drew on some of the sculptural qualities of Olivetti typewriters in Italy. The result was a patented, timeless shape, and a high-water mark for IBM’s industrial design and product innovation. “A writer’s machine if ever there was one,” noted Jane Smiley in Writers on Writing, Vol. II.

Less well-known is the Selectric typewriter’s role as one of the first computer terminals. While personal computers, notebook computers and word processing software may have relegated the paper-based typewriter to twentieth-century artifact, the Selectric was the basis for the keyboard input on the revolutionary IBM System/360. A modified version of the Selectric, dubbed the IBM 2741 Terminal, was adapted to plug into the System/360, and enabled a wider range of engineers and researchers to begin talking to and interacting with their computers.
Yet to IBM computer scientist Bob Bemer, the Selectric represented “one of the biggest professional failures of my life.” Bemer had pioneered the creation of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, which still defines the alphabet for computers. When prototypes of the Selectric were already being manufactured at IBM’s typewriter plant in Lexington, Kentucky, Bemer reviewed the Selectric typewriter’s specifications. To him, the Selectric would make a natural computer keyboard. He argued that the type ball should be designed to carry 64 characters required for ASCII, rather than the typewriter standard 44. That would make it relatively easy to convert the Selectric for computer input. The response, as Bemer remembers it, was dismissive. As a result, the Selectric never spoke ASCII, instead employing a unique code based on the tilt and rotate commands to the golf ball. While Bemer viewed this as his failure, engineers continued to rig Selectric typewriters to function as the first generation of computer keyboards and input devices.

In 1971, the Selectric II was released, with sharper corners and squarer lines, as well as new features such as the ability to change “pitch” from 10 to 12 characters per inch and, starting in 1973, a ribbon to correct mistakes. The final model, the Selectric III, was sold in the 1980s with more advanced word processing capabilities and a 96-character printing element. But as personal computers and daisy-wheel printers began to dominate, the Selectric brand was retired in 1986.

Would you like to change your photos into beautiful graphic design pieces? 'addLib' is an application for iPhone that edits your photos and creates a variety of design based on educated theories.

addLib mixes the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio and the Facial Recognition System, and then creates graphic design. It seems the layout is made at random, but it comes from the rigorous calculated system. These theories have been made through the process that people have been trying to find new expression, and they are also the ways, to capture very ordinary “beauty” in nature, namely algorithm.

The i24R3Portable is an extension of the i24R3 wireless speaker project collaboration between EOps and Michael Young studio. The i24R3Portable is a family of portable speakers with various specific functional configurations to suit different user lifestyles.

"This project is about a serious portable waterproof speaker, I have always wanted one myself but there are big constraints to achieve the best sound quality while being waterproof and lightweight. The conventional waterproof speaker drivers are simply not up to the job. We have achieved a fundamental improvement in waterproof portable speaker design by using a totally sealed sound chamber design with light weight and powerful flat panel speakers and passive radiators which can provide really strong music perfomance. And the circular form and the thickness of the i24R3Portable speaker happens to be the most appropriate form that can satisfy the challenging engineering requirement and coincidentally also look nice with the original i24R3 wireless speaker system. The i24R3Portable comes with a tube stand that is very unconventional for a portable speaker. The tube stand is something playful but people can use it like a handle for portability like carrying the speaker from indoor living room to the balcony but it is also removable so that people can mount the speaker in the wall if they want.", Michael Young (UK).

The different versions available allow the user to listen to music via PC or Mac computers, mobile phones, IPhones or MP3Players.

The Panasonic Design Museum is an online museum which provides information regarding Panasonic's rich history. It includes an exclusive collection of remarkable product designs dating back to 1918. 

	Improved attachment plug The very first product to be manufactured by Matsushita Electric was an innovative attachment plug, designed by Konosuke Matsushita himself. Uniquely, the plug was made from resin, and showed characteristic forward thinking, recycling the metal screw-in sections of used light bulbs.
5-Tube Radio PS-54	Plastic Body Vacuum MC-1000
Panapet Ball and Chain Radio R-70	Toot-A-Loop Radio R-72
Reel To Reel Deck RS-1500	Record Player SL-10
Lumix Digital Camera DMC-FX7	Digital Audio Player SV-MP510V

Core77 and Greener Gadgets invited designers to explore the concept of "Greener Gadgets.
The top 50 entries are published online for voting and commenting, and from these the judges will pick the Top 10 to be judged live at the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City on February 27th.
Voting ends February 20th. Click, get inspired, and vote!

'VE09 Blister Radio' by Klaus Rosburg (United States) The VE09 Blister Radio is made from PLA, a biodegradable, thermoplastic, aliphatic polyester derived from renewable resources such as cornstarch (in the U.S.) or sugarcanes. The solar panel in the back of the clear blister pack recharges the batteries allowing the user to operate the radio without ever opening the clamshell package.
'Blight' by Vincent Gerkens (Belgium) This solar blind creates a link between indoor and outdoor, taking the daylight during the day and giving it back at night. The advantage of the Venetian blind is to have a large surface exposed to sunlight in a small, cumbersome object. With the revolving blades we can follow the course of the sun in order to catch a maximum of energy. Moreover we can adjust the position of the lamp to obtain various lighting effects. The produced energy can be used to supply a computer or other devices, by means of an inverter.
'Power-Hog' by Mathieu Zastawny, Mansour Ourasanah, Tom Dooley, Peter Byar, Elysa Soffer, Mathieu Turpault (United States) Power-Hog is a power consumption metering piggy bank designed to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use.
'eMetric' by Jason Deperro (United States) eMetric is an office power management system that allows teams of conscientious workers to control and learn about their electronics' energy consumption - saving energy and money.

New Nokia 7900 Crystal Prism fuses graphic design with the latest technology.

Nokia's creative director Matt Bickley has collaborated with graphic and fashion designer Frédérique Daubal on a special edition art phone.

The Nokia 7900 Crystal Prism graphic design was created by Daubal, whose signature illustrations have caught the imagination of the design worlds, leading to creations and concepts for Droog Design, Colette, Swear, Gas Tokyo, Paul Smith and lighting designer Charles Vicarini to name a few. Her conceptual designs have been featured in the most discerning publications including Hint Mag, Cream and graphiK magazine.
 
In creating this intriguing design, inspiration is taken from the way in which crystals are formed in precious stones and minerals. ‘For the backplate we were catching different intensities of light and its multiple refractions,’ says Daubal. ‘Looking through a diamond gives you that experience’.
The covers have been etched with laser technology making the Nokia 7900 Crystal Prism a stunning object to behold.
 
It would be interesting to know if this kind of collaboration between product designer and graphic designer will repeat itself in the future.

Here are some other works by Frédérique Daubal:

'Wallpaper'                                             'Freelance' for Paul Smith