Interview with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold’s chief designer
You may not know Brian Leonard’s name, but you’ve almost certainly used one of his products. He was design director at Dell during the genesis of its XPS range, before returning to Lenovo four years ago. Even at that point, he was sketching ideas of what a foldable computer could look like; he just had to wait a further two years for LG to catch up and produce the required AMOLED panels.
“The ideas around folding screens have been around for a long time,” he told PC Pro in an exclusive interview on Lenovo’s bustling stand, “and we’ve all been dreaming about ’em. So fake models, screens and stuff, we’ve been doing for years. It was maybe two years ago we saw the first working panel and that’s really when it came alive, because there’s something to opening it and seeing that screen bend… you can spend all the money in the world on a fake model, but it’s not meaningful until you see the display.”
By this point, though, Leonard and his team of designers had a good idea of what they wanted to produce. “Even when they were paper models I didn’t like the way they were working,” he said. “They were very mechanical and they didn’t feel very human. I felt like we could take a step with the folding display… to make it a more human device versus feeling like I’m carrying around a lot of metal bits.
“We wanted to have a different material on it so that it really felt like a little Moleskine notebook when I carried it,” he said. “So it’s really based off the Moleskine book, which is where the leather cover came from. And we also didn’t want people to have to go to a third party to put other types of protection on it; we wanted to build all that in, as well as the stand, so that’s kind of the genesis of the idea.”
While that idea seems simple, the execution was anything but. The screen is designed to bend without damage for three to five years of active life – Lenovo is tight-lipped about the exact numbers of bends – and that meant thousands of man hours spent developing and refining the hinge, along with an interlocking two-plate mechanism, so that everything glides lides into place. “Figuring that out ut was quite challenging,” said aid Leonard, with some understatement. “The movement mechanisms in that thing, because of the sliding cover and the hinge itself, they’re works of art. We covered them up but they’re works of art.”
There was still time for deft design touches, including what he calls the “ham sandwich” where the detachable Bluetooth keyboard fits snugly into the air gap between the two sides of the X1 Fold when you close it up.
So how does Leonard imagine people will use the Fold, we asked? With keyboard? Without? “It’s going to be the test case, because you see how much people actually use that keyboard versus the OSK [on-screen keyboard],” he said. “I think they’ll definitely use it when it’s set up in full tablet mode with the kickstand. That’s why I like the way it stows.”
The one sacrifice Leonard and his team had to make, however, was an integrated stylus. “We tried to have a little stylus in but it kept getting smaller and smaller and then it was like, this isn’t any value anymore. So we chose to just pull it out, put in a full-size pen. I feel like that’s something I want from a device to replace my Moleskine: I wanted a really great pen and be able to have quick access to it. Take my notes right now convert them digitally and then draw a sketch, whatever.” Just like he did four years ago…