The 11+ Bottle Humidifier was designed by Yeongkyu Yoo, an incredible industrial designer who designs products for 11+ and runs the design studio cloudandco.

The Bottle Humidifier is certainly on the more modest side as far as output, so it’s best for small spaces. Even in a small room I found it to be less powerful than I might have anticipated. Perhaps this is because I typically use it only in winter, when I find the air far too dry. But should its constant mode be too strong, it also has an intermittent mode.

These modes (and device’s power) are intuitively controlled by a button at the base of the power cord. This cord is brilliantly executed; it’s flat, orange, and has the same soft-touch feel as the rest of the product. So often, power cords are treated as afterthoughts, but here, it’s a joy to experience. It’s also nice that the orange is so visible so you’re less likely to knock over the bottle of water by tripping over it, particularly a concern in the small desk environment you might use it in.

The device is powered by USB (the cord is USB-B), a nice choice given that one may use any USB adapter or even a computer’s USB port to power it, though I am scared at the prospect of having a device filled with water right next to a vulnerable laptop. I use a 5W Apple adapter such as those bundled with iPhones, which fits the aesthetic pretty well, though, as an aside, I wish Apple would consider soft-touch matte plastic like this humidifier has instead of its easily scratchable and, to my taste, less appealing high-gloss finish.

That said, as Andrew Kim of Minimally Minimal fame said in his review, “it would have been nice to see the same design in more premium materials like ceramic and glass.” I’d also be remiss to not include another point he makes:

“What makes the humidifier particularly successful in my opinion is the juxtaposition of soft surfaces with sharp edges. It’s a modern approach to design that I believe to be the most relevant language in contemporary industrial design. It speaks to the friendliness of modern products but also expresses the precision and manufacturing prowess we have.”

— Andrew Kim, Minimally Minimal

Even better is the power light, which emits as a faint but easily visible glow from behind the white plastic. It’s solid on in the constant mode, and flashes in the intermittent mode.

I love the way this light acts impacts the interaction. It’s often taken for granted that a variable element—like controls or feedback—should be always visible, but it’s powerful to consider how you can shape users’ perceptions of interactivity by changing when and how things are even noticed. Switches, for instance, should be visible to provide the user a clear path for interaction. But notification feedback lights like these need not be visible until their information is required. Instead, the information may appear as if by magic in an appropriate context.

Here, this light is similar to the way that Apple implemented the sleep light on a generation of Macbooks. The light, like it does here, would emit from a seemingly solid surface, just where it was noticeable and necessary, and entirely disappear when it became irrelevant, dramatically reducing the likelihood a user would misinterpret the light as an interactive control.

The effort in Apple’s solution shows how impactful and valuable this choice is. While the Bottle Humidifier seems to just place a light behind translucent plastic, Apple, if I’m not mistaken, engineered a way to laser cut a tiny perforation into an otherwise solid block of aluminium (as Jony Ive so famously said) to make this magical vanishing act possible even on the surface of apparently solid metal.

The user’s perception of control comes from their observation of a surface’s affordance. In the case of a solid, uniform surface, a user logically concludes not only that interaction is not intended/designed, but that there may not even be a technological/engineered means by which their interaction might be recorded. This is much like best practices when it comes to error states: it’s okay to handle errors with notifications to the user, but it’s far better to make it impossible for it to occur at all. And misunderstanding by the user of what is a controllable part of the device is a sort of error, all the more terrible for the fact that it occurs in immutable hardware. Moreover, even if it were changeable—perhaps for a later user—it likely goes unnoticed by the designer so that its incidence cannot be readily reduced in the future.

Design in the humidifier space seems highly polarized, with both very low- and very high-quality designs. I imagine that most people don’t care what their humidifier looks like since they’re considered second-class appliances, but there’s no reason for this to be the case.

Paper + Clay + Water + Air

Humidifiers can be such beautiful objects as the 11+ Bottle Humidifier shows. Another great concept is Maxime Louis-Courcier’s Red Dot Design Award-winning and sustainable Paper Clay Air-Humidifier.

This much bigger device uses a “corrugated earthenware” panel to pull water up from the base through capillary action alone—no electricity required. One simply pours water into the 4 liter ceramic base and waits. As the water seeps up the panel, it evaporates (the corrugation serves to increase the panel’s evaporative surface area), humidifying the air in an area up to 25 square meters (~82 square feet) with 200g (~7 fluid ounces) of water per hour.

I love devices like this that utilize an entirely energy-free design. It’s kind of the ultimate freedom to be able to use a device—a technology device, designed to replace an electronic appliance—all without plugging it in or charging it. It’s sort of like a plant, conditioning the air around it by the magical action of water, air, and a surface itself made of plants and earth.

One of the nicest things about it is the design choice to use white. Not only can it stand unobtrusively anywhere, the color is also a sustainable, maintenance choice: white “hides the limescale filtered out by the micropores.”

The 11+ humidifier uses capillary action, too, though not to evaporate the water but instead to deliver it to an ultrasonic speaker which uses ultra high frequency sound vibration to vaporize it.

‍

★★★
Excellent