Editors Note: in this article, we spotlight two Santa Cruz Works Partners: Herbst Produkt, and Spanner Product Development. See them on February 5 at Design Thinking. If you do not have tickets, watch via Santa Cruz Works Facebook Live.

Herbst Produkt, Spanner

For Scot Herbst, effective design happens at the intersection of function and emotion. 

On a desk in the Herbst Produkt’s studio in Old Sash Mill, over a dozen tape dispensers sit two rows deep. Styles, shapes, sizes ranging from industrial packing tape guns to a cheap desktop dispenser—research for inventing a new kind of dispenser.

“What’s wrong with this one?” I ask Scot Herbst, touching the plastic desktop dispenser.

“It’s ugly.” 

I start to unravel the tape roll, which instantly falls from its flimsy holster onto the desk. Ugly and poorly functioning.

While most of us might not notice or care if our tape dispenser is ugly (and Scot Herbst certainly isn’t asserting that we should) we’re living in a culture that increasingly does care. As we consume more and more media, buy more and more gadgets, and see non-renewable resources on our planet become less and less, excellent design is a rising value in the cultural zeitgeist—though perhaps an as-yet subconscious one. Increasingly, every product we encounter has a personality, a curated story that strikes an emotional chord—backpacks (adventurer!), water bottles (ah, refreshing health!), diapers (cool mommy!).

Helming Herbst Produkt as Creative Director and Partner (with his father and COO, Walter Herbst, who founded the company in 1968), Scot Herbst is simply more conscious of design than the rest of us.

“I couldn’t find a good wagon for my son,” Hersbt told me, “so I had to make one.”

While “couldn’t” is relative here (I’m sure his son could have dealt with a Radio Flyer just like the rest of us) Herbst’s point is that there is much more complexity to products than just manufacturing them. Herbst envisioned a certain kind of feeling, a certain emotional narrative that he wanted his son’s wagon to exude.

“You can do beautiful objects all day long,” says Herbst, “but you have to build a personality around a product for it to be emotionally compelling.”

That goes for every single thing we see, hear, wear, and use, even for spaces and experiences. Whether we know it or not.

Storytelling By Design

Consider the plastic soap bottle.

When Method released its first tear-drop shaped bottle by iconic designer Karim Rashid, soap gained a new personality. Method soap was funky. It was cool. It wasn’t like other soaps. It brightened our kitchens, our bathrooms. We suddenly felt affectionate toward soap. 

The difference between designed things and “made” things is the story. How does this object fit into the story of a person’s life? Excellent design isn’t necessarily noticeable or invisible, but it comes with built-in emotional context. Design gives a poetic “why” to a product’s features.

Humans crave meaning. Some say we need it for happy, healthy lives. And so we surround ourselves with objects that help us devise meaning. This is the incredible power of product design. It reaches much deeper than ergonomics and functionality.

“At our core, we are storytellers,” says Damien Golbin.

Golbin and Niall Macken, Senior Product Designers at Spanner Product Development Product Development, are committed to deeply examining the poetic and functional “why” when it comes to the features of products they design.

“It’s all about empathy,” adds Macken. Does a certain feature add meaningful value to a user’s life?

Take Buoy, the eponymous device by the Santa Cruz-based company (now acquired by Resideo) that revolutionized household water usage tracking. The then-start-up brought a “pile of tech” to Herbst Produkt, and Herbst saw the need for a compelling story.

“The problem was that people had no idea how much water they were using,” Herbst says. Reciting technical facts about what Buoy did wasn’t enough, because people weren’t already invested in the problem. The physical device needed a personality that people could connect with. 

And, gosh, is it cute.

“The Rebound Is Infinite”

Scot Herbst compares the importance of emotional appeal in design to Wallace J. Nichols’s approach to promoting ocean conservation: appealing to emotion is the keystone of getting people to care, and thus to act.

But what happens when the story of a product doesn’t consider its own impact on the wider world?

Spanner, which focuses heavily on high-tech functionality aspects, sees an enormous opportunity for their work to pivot a conversation around “radical” sustainability. That means making super-critical design decisions about a product’s lifespan, its repairability, and its energy usage. 

“The rebound is infinite,” Golbin says of products that don’t consider sustainability at their core.

Spanner works with clients like Google and Amazon, as well as many smaller, younger companies, creating everything from EV charging ports to sci-fi-like relaxation wearables. Spanner can’t necessarily shift the business plans of huge corporations to design around radical sustainability. But they can and do “turn the needle” by advising smaller companies to make those decisions. For this reason, they like to be involved in the design process as early as possible, perhaps even before a solid business plan is created.

Golbin and Macken are confident that a turning point is approaching, at which a critical mass of designers, business leaders, and major corporations will focus primarily on sustainability. Golbin observes how far ahead Europe is than the U.S. when it comes to legal regulations about things like product warranty “and Right of Repair.”

“We believe it will be a key differentiator when sustainability is a key marketing tactic,” says Macken.

Why Santa Cruz?

Founded by Giles Lowe and Arne Lang-Ree in San Jose, Spanner opened a satellite office in downtown Santa Cruz after the treacherous rains of early 2017. That was Golbin’s first winter here after relocating from France, and, understandably, he thought the commute was insane. Macken and a few other teammates also lived in Santa Cruz, so why not find a solution true to their open-minded, design-thinking values?

There was another underlying inspiration in that office expansion: to gather and amplify the Santa Cruz hardware and design community. While the local product and industrial design economy can seem more underground than software/cloud/data enterprises, Macken, who has been here for 30 years, has long been confident that the design community here is incredibly strong.

Golbin and Maken’s dream now is to create a hub of community and synergy around hardware in Santa Cruz. Their vision is a physical space serving as incubator, workshop, whatever the community wants it to be.

Santa Cruz could be the perfect place to synthesize ideas around user-centric sustainable design into a hard-hitting movement. The philosophy aligns with Santa Cruz ethos of sustainability and innovation, and the infrastructure and talent for the industry are already here.

In the meantime, they’ve started by creating Santa Cruz Hardware Group, a meet-up style gathering of like-minded folks to connect over design ideas (and beers). The first meeting, one year ago, drew a crowd of 40. The next meeting is tonight, January 30, at Camp Six Labs.

Damien Golbin, Niall Macken, and Scot Herbst will all speak about their approaches to design and local community at a special Santa Cruz Works New Tech event on February 5.

Julia Sinn is a freelance writer, brand messaging consultant, event designer, and project manager.

Read more of her work and connect with her at juliarosesinn.com.