Let's talk about lab water
Let's talk about lab water
In the penultimate blog of the series on product design we’ll be exploring the principles of making a product understandable, honest and long lasting as outlined in Dieter Ram’s principles of product design. If you’ve missed the previous blogs you can catch up on part 1 and part 2.
“It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best it is self-explanatory.”
Water purity is an often misunderstood element of scientific research. If you want to find out more you can check out our blog series on the “unsung hero of the lab”. Different applications need different levels of water purity. Feedback we received told us that for less critical applications the exact purity of the water is often not important, as long as it falls within the acceptable range for the specific application or experiment.
PURELAB Chorus 2 and 3 have a visual alarm which can be set to the user’s specification meaning that it will glow white when the system is running correctly, but red when the water quality drops below the desired level. PURELAB Chorus 1, which is used for more critical applications has the same visual indication, but when a halo dispenser is connected to the system it will display the exact water purity at the point of dispense. The halo itself will also glow to indicate the system’s status. Anyone can see the status of the system (even when stood across the lab) without necessarily having to understand the detail of the water quality.
The Halo provides control of the unit and gives easy to understand information on the screen including water purity at the point of dispense and TOC levels. It will also display the status of any other Chorus unit which is connected via a smart link cable. As well as providing valuable information to the scientist in the lab, the Halo is also easy to operate. The touch surface has only five buttons. Auto volume dispense (only available on flexible and advanced versions), two menu navigation buttons with a select button and finally the variable flow dispense button. Each function is clearly labelled and navigation of the menu system is simple.
“It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”
The PURELAB Chorus has been designed to provide ultrapure water for the laboratory environment. It will not make your morning coffee but it will give you consistent, accurate pure water to use in your experiments. The aesthetic design and materials used to manufacture our products has moved on significantly in recent years, but the quality of components and ensuring that it does what it was designed to do well are still of the utmost importance.
“It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.”
In its latest iteration, the aesthetic design of PURELAB range (PURELAB Chorus) has made a radical departure from existing and older products. These have stood the test of time, so why did we decide to change the product at all?
The PURELAB range has been around for a very long time. In fact the PURELAB UHQ was launched nearly 25 years ago and we still see it in laboratories even now! While it doesn’t look out of place, there is no doubt that the technologies and materials available to us have significantly moved on. It would be remiss for us not to take advantage of these innovations in our latest products and to improve on the form factor and usability of the systems while we’re at it.
We hope that in another 25 years the design of the current generation will have lasted as well as our legacy products.