They even jettisoned their own distinctive, Swedish-owned design for something generic, multinational and bland.
Although there is nothing workaday about the collection, much of it has been designed for something more than special occasions.
I guessed that a rack of short see-through plastic raincoats were designed for something akin to intimate pudding wrestling.
Mr. Gates is an investor with Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, in a company called TerraPower, which has developed a design for something called the traveling wave reactor.
But as the pressure on school places mounts, with a shortfall of a quarter of a million places predicted, and no sign that the coalition will reverse its ban on local authorities setting up schools themselves, it seems certain that more new schools will open in buildings originally designed for something else.
"The big problem for home robots is, right now, Roombas are low to the ground, and our homes are designed for something that's between five and six feet tall and skinny.
Microsoft has reportedly ditched the hip moniker for its design language for something a bit more pedestrian: Windows 8. Previously, the name Metro was part of the design mantra that started with Windows Phone 7 and has since trickled into Windows and Xbox.
The traditional top-down approach to design in which 'we, the designers, are designing something for you, the users', tacitly assumes the former.
(I've personally always appreciated Hopper's clean design for making something like booking airfare seem more straightforward, and Flex Watch continues that trend).
One change in Apple's product design — for example, something as simple as alphabetization, which a leather wallet doesn't do! — could move Bank of America ahead of Capital One as a "default," moving more purchases in that direction.
