Design, Not Style

What’s the difference between style and design? This computer from Neiman Marcus and Honeywell in 1969.

You design an experience; you style an object. The Honeywell computer has great style (well, for 1969), but the design was completely unconsidered. What experience would ever require such an object? The advertisement suggests that a housewife would use it to organize her recipes and balance the checkbook. Even if she did, the binary interface and output hardly seems useful, let alone intuitive.

Anyway, the primary purpose of such a machine was probably to get publicity, like Neiman Marcus’ recent robots for sale, and that task I’m sure it did well.

Lots of info at http://starfish.osfn.org/~mikeu/h316/kitchen.shtml