When did you last buy a new toothbrush? I ask not out of the usual dentist's solicitude, but to alert you to a revolution in product design. Toothbrushes have changed. The latest ones have two-tone handles, made of two kinds of plastic with contrasting properties. One material gives the handle its strength, the other is soft and rubbery and has what designers apparently call "rimples" (part ridges, part dimples) moulded into it for easy grip. The two plastics are simultaneously injected into a mould and somehow don't end up mixed, like rice pudding and jam.
It is the fashion, the designer Geoff Hollington tells me, to use materials in complex combinations. The iMac computer is the most obvious leader of a piebald stampede that includes trainers and sports cars, kitchen appliances and "leisurewear". Hollington has himself designed a glass vase and candlesticks with rubber parts for Design Ideas. "The rubber base makes it a 1990s vase," he says.
These spurious constructions make one worry for the future of simple products made of one piece of stuff. By their nature, the best of these edge towards sculpture or hark back to the first utensils. Take the ice-cream scoop by Kenneth Grange, the designer of the InterCity 125 train. With no moving parts, no fancy insulating handle and no "features", it does its job superbly. At rest, it has bulk and a pleasing abstract shape. It's very Mooreish.
More obviously ingenious things are also one-piece wonders: that perennial designers' favourite, the paper clip; enduring toys such as the Slinky. Unlike the ice-cream scoop or other primitive tools, these items perform on their own without the need for human manipulation. Made of only one part, they somehow manage to suggest they have many moving parts. Designers are intrigued by this paradox, and are taking advantage of developments in materials and manufacturing processes to develop more such products. The one-piece briefcase is made out of a single piece of plastic moulded in such a way that the handle and the "moving parts", the hinges and fasteners, are made of one continuous piece of plastic. The original design is by Bernard Samms from as long ago as the 1960s. Tony Benn had one kitted out, Bond-style, to unfold as a lectern from which he could deliver speeches about the white heat of technology.
The latest in this line is the clothes peg that has been chosen as a "Millennium Product". It's hard to imagine a clothes peg that could be so special. It, too, is made of one piece of plastic, and yet it yields and snaps and grips just like a traditional sprung wooden peg. A plastic isthmus of a hinge and tiny springs modelled on car suspension systems see to that. The peg is the brainchild of TMS, a start-up company in Tamworth, and was designed by Steve May-Russell of Smallfry in Coventry, not one of your London dilettantes. It doesn't split or leave rust marks on your clothes. But the main advantage is to the manufacturer. There are no assembly costs so it can compete against imports that rely on cheap labour.
In a land where Lara Croft beckons us towards the future, "it's good that low-level innovation is sometimes appreciated," says May-Russell. Of course, clothes pegs always used to be made of one piece of material. The archetypal form celebrated by Claes Oldenburg was laboriously whittled from a suitable stick. Even machine-age one-piece products are perhaps not as simple as they seem. Adam Smith used the pin to illustrate the division of labour. There were five jobs: a man to draw the wire, then a straightener, a cutter, a pointer and a head grinder. A similar choreography can, for example, be seen laid out for public marvel at Dartington Glass, where glowing lumps of glass are passed from hand to hand on their way to becoming jugs or vases.
Plastic moulding collapses all these jobs into one, and that's done by machine. The new division of labour reveals the designer, materials scientist, production engineer and so on, but no person actually forming things and putting them together. With assembly making up a large proportion of the cost of a product, one-piece products promise huge profits for their manufacturers. Their new features - the rimples on toothbrushes and the rubberised grips moulded seamlessly into the hard plastic casings of the new generation of DIY tools - are the consumer's dividend.
More versatile plastics and fancier moulding techniques will gradually embrace a wide range of properties and bring more persuasive benefits. There are already scalpels with plastic blades and spectacles where the same structural plastic used for the frames miraculously becomes optically clear for the lenses.
Today it is perhaps mainly designers who appreciate the magic of an object that is made in one contiguous lump but which has discontinuous properties. Their underlying ambition, to achieve continuous variation according to function, sounds like a chapter heading from On the Origin of Species. Take that as a clue. Product design is undergoing an evolutionary explosion.
Toothbrushes have emerged from the swamp.
