Seeing the light

Canadian product designers Duane Smith and Stefane Barbeau were on their way to Provincetown in 1996 when they passed through Boston and impulsively decided to stay here.

''It felt comfortable," Smith says. ''We literally stumbled on it."

They also stumbled on what Barbeau now refers to as a ''professional jackpot." Though they had no idea at the time, Boston is one of the country's foremost centers of product design -- a mecca for people like Smith, 33, and Barbeau, 34, whose skills lie at the unexpected nexus of art and geekiness.

Over the next four years, the two would work at a total of six industrial design firms and rack up enough experience to launch their own product design company, Vessel, in 2001. Their innovative first project, a rechargeable lamp they called Candela, swiftly captured the attention of design snobs and earned Vessel a slew of major design awards.

Candela also shed light on Boston's reputation as a cutting-edge design city. Though the area is well known for its prowess in medicine, higher education, and technology, a lesser-known fact is that it's also one of the nation's two hot spots for product design. (San Francisco is the other.)

This robust design community ranges from artsy types at Vessel, near Chinatown, and PUMA, the high-concept footwear company in the Boston Design Center, to heavy-duty computer nerds at large international firms such as IDEO in Lexington and Newton's Design Continuum, the design brains behind the Swiffer, developed with Procter & Gamble.

They are drawn here for different reasons -- the engineering schools; the Massachusetts College of Art, the only public college in New England with an accredited industrial design department; the host of high-tech and medical device companies ever in need of new equipment; and the fiscal reality: It's cheaper to live here than New York, another center for design with its focus on fashion and furniture.

Many of them work at firms that, in keeping with today's cool aesthetic of minimalism, have one-word names such as Manta, IDEO, Eleven, Altitude, and Plank. (The roster also includes Design Continuum, which insiders call ''Continuum," Essential Design, known as ''Essential," and Catapult Thinking, commonly called ''Catapult." The multisyllabic Herbst LaZar Bell is an exception.)

But even though the world of Boston product design has a low public profile, it's created a lot of high-profile products used in everyday life. ''Everything from water filters to cellphones to heaters to coffee machines to medical equipment to razors to housewares," says Josh Greenberg, a Quincy product designer. Herbst LaZar Bell was responsible for the Motorola headset used by Bill Belichick and other NFL coaches. IDEO came up with a new look for Sam Adams tap handles. Manta was the consulting design group for the new ''Scooba" robotic floor cleaner, while Catapult Thinking came up with the brand name. Essential Design did the Shure E Series earphones.

Product design ''used to be seen as more of a gear-head thing -- as a field for people who think being able to do a splashy car panel is design," says James Read, head of MassArt's department of industrial design.

Not anymore. The people involved in product design possess a kind of eggheady hipness. They have sophisticated computer skills and are adept at visualizing objects in 3-D computer simulations but also have an eye for aesthetics and an obsessive urge to improve subtle defects in everyday products. ''We are cursed to always be thinking about how things can be better," says mechanical engineer David Harting, a partner at the Boston design firm Eleven.

Much of their work involves studying trends and social behavior; some of the larger firms even have staff psychologists and anthropologists to do ethnographic research on consumer groups to see how they use products and what's likely to sell a year or two down the road. (Prediction from Scott Stropkay and Richard Watson at Essential: Watch for skinny pants in '06, and consumer electronics with patterned surfaces.)

As a result, they notice subtle nuances in behavior -- for example, the fact that for teenagers taking pictures is ''more like a social ritual than historical archiving," says David Privitera of IDEO; this led to their design of the Polaroid i-Zone instant camera, which is ''more of a fashion statement," he says.

Because so much of today's consumer market is geared toward youth, it's perhaps not surprising that many of these designers are themselves young and exude cool. They're inclined toward tiny eyeglasses and square analog wristwatches. They work in a collegial world where designers all seem to know each other and have worked for each other's companies, and where creative energy is palpable. At IDEO in Lexington, file drawers are labeled ''Amazing Materials" and ''Cool Mechanisms," and there's a gong in the hallway that staff members strike when they have something to celebrate.

''These are like-minded people," says Antonio Bertone, global director of brand management for Puma, speaking of his colleagues in shoe design, which in the Boston area also includes Saucony, New Balance, and Reebok. ''They're modern and forward-thinking. Design is a huge part of their lives. They're not history buffs. They're not Vineyarders. They're evening-oriented. They talk about fashion and art. They're the original iPod people, the ones who bought it first."

The word ''cool" infuses conversations in every design firm, where discussions revolve around ''cool brand image," ''cool materials," ''cool utility."

And whether by luck or foresight, the designers are riding a wave that they might not have seen coming: America's infatuation with well-designed, compelling objects, from the OXO Good Grips paring knife -- which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art -- to the Dyson canister vacuum cleaner, which was featured in a window display at Barneys in New York.

Which is good news for, among others, the founders of Vessel, whose products just keep coming and now include a tiny clock that clips onto a shirt pocket, for that growing segment of the youth market who don't use watches but depend on the corner of their computers to tell the time. For these people, Barbeau, the Canadian immigrant, says Boston is ''a land of opportunity."