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Comment by sushisource | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a lot of effort to design an exact equivalent to an Odwalla bottle.

But isn't that exactly what design should do? Not mimic for the sake of mimicry, but attempt to better understand the rationale for any decision and ultimately designing with intent. The homework is the meat of the thing.

So what if the result is the same? At least the team behind the work now understands how they got there—and communicate as much to their current or potential fan base.

I wouldn't want to hire a babysitter to watch my child if their sales pitch was: "I've watched a lot of babysitters in movies, I know what I'm doing." It's a bit of a silly comparison of course, but the point remains: how you get to a result is just as important—if not more important—as the result itself. That's good design!

"because I've experimented and I know what works with childcare and what doesn't"

hm...

I guess it depends on how much time and money you want to waste.

A team of people spent two years supposedly working on this. That same team could probably have gotten samples from 4-5 manufacturers and selected an Odwalla bottle with a brand design in 2-3 weeks.

It just seems silly and wasteful to me. But hey, it's not my money!

A distinctive bottle makes the product stand out

How distinctive can it be when to the average consumer it's the same as Odawalla?

I see your point, but I'm going to call a bit of bullshit on it. What you are saying makes sense if the team then moves on to perform similar tasks again and can use this institutional knowledge to their advantage. But here it seems that the team was actually at least in part comprised of outside consultants. So they did spend two years of Soylent's time and money to design and Odwalla bottle. Sure it makes for a cool story, but it seems more like they could have saved themselves about 18-20 months by looking harder for different packaging options instead of inventing new ones, not to mention the money that went into this. No really, they didn't mention how much this cost.

Your comparison can actually be used as a counterpoint to your argument: maybe they should have hired someone who didn't need to look at so many reference designs to figure out sqround.

but! Science??

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