Designing Dream Machines

According to Dick Powell and Richard Seymour, there is a thing called the X-factor.  Every product from a motorbike to a kettle has something about it that makes you want to have it.  Their job is to find the X-factor, and give it to new products before they reach the market.

 “When a product’s in a shop,” Richard Seymour says, “the consumer’s scanning around, and you’ve got maybe a few nanoseconds to hook them.  They make their decision first, and they justify it afterwards.  We want people to think, ‘I like it;  I want it;  what is it?’   In that order.  That’s X-factor.”

This programme follows them for much of 1995 as they give the ‘x-factor’ treatment to a food processor for the next century, a scooter for India that must be able to carry the whole family plus forty kilos of bananas - and the first BSA motorbike for more than twenty years.