Ceres Miller / Product Designer

There are 3 kinds of calculator: Graphing, which is used for mathematics, Business, which has extra functions for business and banking calculations, and Basic, which can add, subtract, divide, and multiply. A basic calculator for an industrial or office-user market however means a sturdy, inexpensive calculator for a desk or counter.

People use their phones for day-to-day calculations, but some may prefer not to. They may look for a low-tech alternative solution, and a retro-styled calculator focussed on ergonomics may appeal to them. Sturdiness and robust-looking styling is a useful selling point for the retail, hospitality and catering industries, who use basic calculators regularly, but the calculator should not be out of place in an office.

Taking a product apart to learn about it and then make it again in a different way offers a lot of learning if that process is undertaken in a controlled and studied way. For me looking at all the ways a cheap product uses to save money and make assembly easier feels helpful: the entire product held together with two screws, cables stuck down with hastily applied hot glue, the use of circuitry printed on a thin plastic sheet rather than a fiberglass PCB. All these little things took a lot of research to develop, and I am able to learn quickly from them.

Increasing the quality of a product doesn't mean abandoning these cost-saving techniques. Rather, I felt, you could spend the saved money on better features, rather than an aluminium case or mechanical keyboard switches. A basic calculator with more expensive, but not necessarily better, components and manufacturing might just not be worth it to the kind of person that's not wanting to use their phone's calculator.

So I focussed on ergonomics, tactility, and experience. In the calculator I designed, the screen angle could be adjusted so to properly face a person sitting at their desk, feet at the back could be risen and the thickness of the calculator was chosen so to be most comfortable to the hand, and computer-keyboard styled keys were used, to give a satisfying click and experience of pressing buttons when using the calculator.

Mechanical keyswitches are very expensive, but are considered to be better. Other basic calculators looking for the same improvement in experience on the market used mechanical switches, but not only are membrane switches much cheaper, but they have a longer service life and with care and attention to key travel and fit of the parts, can feel and sound just like the satisfying click of mechanical switches that's so valuable. Attention to detail using the materials you have available I consider to be a useful skill- avoid running up the cost on things that could be better.

The cost-saving techniques from the cheap calculator benefit all products. To save plastic material and improve sturdiness, plastic housings use webbings. Where my calculator has large, chunky parts, I made use of webbings a lot both to help the outer shell stay strong but also to support components. Through making parts designed to be injection moulded and learning about the techniques used in industry, I was able to use CAD modelling with Rhino to precisely define parts for injection moulding, including draft angles and dimensioned technical drawings.

This calculator was designed taking directly from study of market products. It ended up that I was not just borrowing from the calculator I had taken apart, but also computer keyboards and mice. This combination of features from different products to make something new helps make a calculator designed with the knowlege of improvements to many products made over many decades.