(Dean Hovey's prototype)Pang: Your story about David Kelley sawing off the stick shift of his BMW-- talk about devotion to duty-- and the hundred different models raises this question: How typical was this in product design? Was it normal to experiment with many different kinds of forms and materials?
Sachs: All of us came out of the Stanford product design program, and one of the things that was instilled in all of us was to get to a result quickly. So the idea of designing something, and having everything fabricated to your specifications, was simply too long, slow and expensive a way to see if your idea was valid. So it was a characteristic of this group that you make quick prototypes. The way to make quick prototypes is to take apart something else, or find something similar, and glue it together or cut it in half.
(Dean Hovey's prototype)
So that actually was a very common trait for us. Dean actually took a few things apart to make the first mouse: I think his wife found that certain pieces of the kitchen no longer operated because he'd removed some bearings, and he needed Delrin [an acetal resin made by DuPont; see also Britannica on acetal resin], so he took out a Delrin component from the refrigerator. We all did the same thing: we sacrificed circuitry, we sacrificed anything.
Haltek was one of our favorite places to go. Haltek was a surplus parts store in Silicon Valley: they would buy excess inventory of products that were being trashed, and disassemble them. So you could go in there and buy circuit boards, switches, components. The joke was, your worst nightmare was that one day you'd find pieces of one of the products you'd designed for sale at Haltek. And to this day I think you can still go to Haltek and find inventors who are looking for something that makes a good starting-point, instead of having to start from ground zero.
So this stems from the Stanford philosophy of designing something quickly. And actually, in everything I've ever done in my career, my products have started with a real fast prototype. I'm known for taking some product and running it through a band saw, and cutting off all the pieces I didn't want to come up with something that was a rough model of the final product. It's a proven technique.
Pang: Was that unusual in design programs? Was it something that set Stanford apart?
Sachs: Certainly in the late 1970s and 1980s, it was somewhat unique to Stanford, especially in that the product design program trained students in a combination of engineering, art, and business. That's why Stanford turned out so many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. You have to have a little bit of business sense, and you have to have engineering knowledge, and the aesthetic component was very important-- that's where the art came in. So everybody was a combination of those three things. It affected the practicality of a mouse, the engineering of a mouse, and the aesthetic appearance of a mouse-- the user experience.
One of the guys who was at Stanford when we were there, Mark Fuller, was always playing with water. He would buy all kinds of products that involved water, and make some other new product out of them. His most recent design is the fantastic water fountain at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's the most incredible, computer-designed, aesthetic, engineering feat: there's nothing else like it on the planet. And it just characterizes the same themes. So there are Stanford designers all over the planet doing wild and crazy things, whether it's designing electronic books or water fountains. [Pang laughs]