Nothing is written about tastes, but it is clear that there are designs that left their mark on an era and are so different from other contemporary products that they transcend the boundaries of time. Designs that come to mind are the Game Boy (clones continue to appear with the same shapes, modern versions such as the Analog Pocket), the iMac G4 ‘Lamparita’, egg chairs or Braun’s Citromatic. Yes, a juicer.

Maybe not the Game Boy, but the iMac, chair or Citromatic are inappropriate designs, as if they do not belong to the period in which they were released. And one way or another they follow the rules of industrial design. There are many parameters that can define industrial design, but these include mass production products as well as products where user experience is at the forefront.

If the user has (or might have) a need, designers step in to address it. The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 and became a reference in terms of design and laid the foundations of industrial design, which many followed closely in later years. And one of those companies was Sweden’s Ericsson, creator of some of the most influential mobile phones of the late ’90s, as well as the Ericofon, a hard-to-describe landline phone.

spying on the Germans

At a time when most phones look like the retro phone we now imagine (even the emoji for “phone” includes both retro representation and smartphone representation), Ericsson has managed to stand out with a bold but, above all, highly functional design. compact for time.

We have seen many trends in the recent phone industry. Miniaturization a few decades ago. Then there are mobile phones with sliding keyboards, mobile phones with touch screens, smartphones, huge screens and current spec wars across the board. The same war was continuing in the 1930s. Ericsson had revolutionized the market with its plastic DBH 1001, and the industry was racing to see who could create the most user-friendly design: a one-piece phone.

Germans Siemens & Halske created a prototype of this type of phone, but they could not find the key and their project did not go beyond the test bench. But it was Ericsson who saw the potential. Potential… and some secret information, because the company itself states that its engineers and designers set out to realize the dream of revolutionizing the design of landline phones after gaining access to information about the Siemens project.

This was when the company’s engineers saw how they could invent a workable design and began working on it, with the company’s senior technical manager, Hugo Blomberg, approving the elements for the creation of something known internally as ‘Erifon’. They made various concepts and sketches and it seemed that it would be no problem to create a device with the dial at the base, the ‘off’ button in the middle of the dial, and a ringer and network cable inside a box placed above the dial. wall . And apparently both the headset and microphone were integrated.

Blomberg wanted to realize this project and signed some signatures in 1939. The most important of these was probably Ralph Lysell. He is considered the father of Swedish industrial design, and having lived there for several years, he was knowledgeable about both design and the American market, so he seemed like a great addition to the team. He made various models in wood and clay in his in-house workshop, which allowed him to see their dimensions and evaluate their ergonomics.

He made good progress with fairly robust designs with round shapes, but work on Erifon was discontinued in the early 1940s.

Civil wars and World War II

One thing that is common in companies (both Western and Eastern) is that there are two or more teams designing for different products. This is for one purpose: The more thinking heads there are, the better, and teams compete internally to see who will win the bosses’ favor and who should approve or reject projects. This is how Nintendo brought the Game Boy and Super Nintendo to life, and Microsoft itself had two completely different original Xboxes on the table.

Normally, each team is managed by one person, but in the Ericsson case, Lysell was so interested in the company that he had another project parallel to Erifon. It was called Unifon (they didn’t get too complicated with names, actually) and it was basically just another project to see if they could make a horizontal phone in one piece. They wanted to create a phone that could be dropped on a base that contained the ringer and connection to the phone line, and whose kill switch could be activated due to the phone’s own weight.

After various difficulties, Lysell found the key and everything was ready to start production, but suddenly military mobilization came in Sweden and Ericsson had to suspend the projects. They devoted themselves to the creation of weapons (like many European companies of the time) and communication systems. After the war, there was no strength left to carry out all the projects, and they decided that if they wanted to enter the desired North American market, they would have to turn to a phone with a vertical design.

Cobra has arrived

So in 1949 Ericsson focused on the Erifon, known as the ‘Cobra’ due to its special design. Lysell was no longer with the company, but he had left many designs and models in the carpentry workshops, so the project fell into the hands of Gösta Thames. However, there were problems to be resolved and Thames decided to contact Lysell again to finalize the project. Thus, thanks to the new models, it has both an ergonomic design and, surprisingly, ease of mass production has been achieved thanks to the new material.

Ericsson was convinced to use Bakelite as the main material, with the device eventually becoming the Ericofon. This was the best option since metal was excluded and Bakelite (the first synthetic plastic) was the ideal material, but ABS, a thermoplastic with two key properties, had just emerged: it was more impact resistant and could be produced in any color.

Since Bakelite is a dark color, creating a phone with unique designs and colors was an option that Ericsson would not give up. After the final round of testing, production began at the Karlskrona factories, where 2.5 million Ericofones were produced between 1956 and 1982. The company itself estimates that only 20% of production remains on Swedish soil, with the rest going to other markets.

European countries and Australia were the biggest beneficiaries, and the United States, which Ericsson eagerly wanted to enter, was complicated. The problem was that the Bell System did not allow third-party equipment to operate on its network (for the most part), so Ericofon was only available to independent companies.

Negative

There were two main versions of the Ericofon: One two-piece and the other one-piece, both coming in 18 colors and it’s hard to imagine this phone being 70 years old. He took part in many productions, but perhaps the one that best represents this design, which was foreign to his time, is his appearance in ‘Men in Black’.

In this fantasy film from 1997 (41 years after the launch of the first Ericofon, when many different designs and even extremely compact mobile phones were already available on the market), you can see that each desk in a top-secret government institution has different features. There is an Ericophone on the table.

Watching the movie today there are things that are ‘shocking’ because it has been almost 30 years but the truth is that the keyboards they use and of course the Ericsson phone are also something that does not go out of fashion. It was so unique that even in this movie, where aliens live with humans, it seems futuristic and is undoubtedly an indication that time does not pass through a well-designed device.

The same thing happens with the Game Boy, the iMac G4, and the Braun juicer.

Pictures | Ericsson

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