Steve van Dulken's Patent blog

Design Icons exhibition at Harrods

Harrods, the famous London department store, is hosting an exhibition and events until the 24 May about Design Icons.

Ross Lovegrove, who was in the team that designed the Sony Walkman®, talks in today's Metro free newspaper about seven of his favourite design icons. I liked his comment about mobile phones. He occasionally gets asked to design one, but says "it doesn't get any better than the iPhone. Why would I suddenly do something with buttons on it ?" The personal stereo, by the way, wasn't patented by Sony as they assumed (wrongly) it was an unpatentable idea.

Next Wednesday the paper will feature a similar article by Richard Sapper, who created the ThinkPad®.

New e-format for Britain's designs journal

At the same time as the changes for patents in Britain’s official Patents & Designs Journal, as explained in my last posting, there have been changes in how registered design details have been published.

The Patents & Designs Journal only ever printed brief details of design registrations: title, company name, application dates. From October 1997 until now there was also Designs in View, which for the first time showed images of newly registered designs. Neither was on the Web.

Now that publication will cease, and also from the 2 April 2008 there will no longer be any design details in the Patents & Designs Journal. Instead there is a new Registered Designs Journal, which is available on the Web from the 27 February 2008. Each weekly issue has three formats, with PDF and zip files being archival formats. The third option offers searching. Ordering by image depicts a thumbnail image. Otherwise sorting can be by title, by Locarno class, by proprietor or by agent. In each case the other elements are displayed, except that to see the image you must either sort by image or click on the title.

The new journal is clearly intended for current awareness by professionals. There will only be a 12 month archive online of these issues. However, the British Library will be storing CD-ROMs of the journal.

Otherwise there is a free database which consists of images and other details of all currently in force registered designs. It can be searched by Locarno class or by proprietor, or by a combination, but not by title. Older designs are kept at the National Archives (from 1839) in numerical sequences.

Design Council's study on industrial design

The Design Council has issued a (free), 144 page report called Eleven Lessons: Managing Design in Eleven Global Corporations.

It's about how industrial design makes a better product, and states that for every £100 spent on design there is a £225 increase in turnover. I'm pretty sure that's an understatement -- people are attracted to well-designed products, not ugly ones. Look at the iPod® which has become so iconic that its advertisements have no words, just black and white drawings showing someone using the product and the famous apple with a bite taken out of it. That's brand recognition.

BSkyB, Virgin Atlantic and British Telecom are the British companies featured.

Canada's designs database

Canada has recently added data back to 1861 in its Industrial Designs Database. This means that images of designs can be searched for by name of applicant or title. The latter enriches greatly the ability to search for Victoriana and the like.

You can also browse through the Canadian design classification. This gave me 733-21 as the class for hockey game boards. Asking for this class gave me 21 designs: I expected more.

The results give small images of the design, and you can click for more information. I am aware that American design patents have been scanned but such databases are unwieldy to use -- useful as it is, the Google database does not allow design patents only to be searched for.

The British equivalent are kept in the National Archives. They are very numerous and are kept in immense volumes, sometimes with samples of fabric and the like pinned to the page. Scanning it would be wonderful but also very difficult, and indexing data would be added to make it more than a browsing tool. There is a leaflet about their holdings.