Thermaltake creates separate Tt DesignWorks consultancy

In mainstream life, we're constantly assaulted and assailed by new and innovative designs. Some driven by need (like the replacement of Big Mac polystyrene cartons with recycled card) and some are purely aesthetic (renaming Marathon bars to Snickers). In the computing world, so many things are derivative, that genuine inspiration is harder to find. One Taiwanese company believes it has a solution. KitGuru packs a hidden camera and heads off to investigate.

When the covers rolled back on the Thermaltake Level 10 chassis, even the most hardened journalist was forced into raising their eyebrows and sucking in a little more of that air stuff. It was clearly unlike anything else you'd ever seen. It took a separate engineering design team from BMW to create that kind of audience reaction.

Design like that needs genuine ‘out of the box thinking'. If you're 100% tied into one company and one product line, it's almost impossible to make the big breakthrough.

In consultancy terms, it's called ‘going native'.

When you first come into contact with a market, person or product – you have a genuine opportunity to innovate. The longer you spend ‘inside' that environment, the harder it is the create something new. Everything becomes homogenised and derivative. Not sure what we mean? Try lining up 50 mainboards and looking for genuine differences (i.e. not just heatsink colour).

With the launch of its new Tt DesignWorks web site, Thermaltake is pushing the innovation team slightly outside the company – which should make genuine creativity easier.

Will Tt DesignWorks actually create ideas for other companies – thereby liberating the designers completely?  At this stage, it's uncertain.

KitGuru says: Any move to increase innovation in this market must be applauded. When you look at how straightforward the iPad is as a design, and the fact that all of the technology encased in each unit was already available (one way or another) in the market, you can see how important design is. Good luck to the chaps and chapesses at Tt DesignWorks – we hope they get the chance to work with companies other than Thermaltake.

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