Deconstructing Product Design

TOUCH! Tableware

Barbara Schmidt, Cornelia Müller, Mirjami Rissanen, and speziell produktgestaltung for Kahla, 2004

1. It is no small achievement to innovate a product that has not fundamentally changed for more than thousand years, but fusing porcelain with velvet flocking has done just that. The TOUCH! series of porcelain tableware, a name that is cleverly directive and descriptive, demonstrates the role that basic research and technological developments play in product innovation, yielding the all-too-common “solution in search of a problem,” Jens Pohlmann, cofounder and designer of speziell produktgestaltung, comments: “To begin with, we were looking for a warming covering for a metal bench, but then we suddenly thought, why not give other ...