Pivot Power is going to turn heads as easily as its power outlets turn. We caught up with the man behind the product, Jake Zien, as we started shipping these babies out.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m Jake Zien, a proud native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a student on the cusp of graduation from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I’m a graphic design major and a computer science minor. I feel that designing and programming are remarkably analogous activities: both, at their core, are about creating beautiful systems. To me, though, each is at its best when used in service of the other: design is most interesting when it solves a problem of usability, and programming is most useful when it is made to feel organic and knowable. I’m passionate about great user interfaces and great cheeseburgers, and I hope to become an expert in the creation of both.
2. When did you join Quirky?
The day I submitted Pivot Power, if I remember correctly. Feel free to fact-check me against my profile page.
3. How did you find out about us?
For the few years between coming up with the idea during RISD Precollege and submitting it to Quirky, I had been working with a close family friend, a corporate intellectual property lawyer, on researching and applying for patents to protect my concept. He called me one afteroon to tell me about an article he had just read on American Airlines’ (?) in-flight magazine, which wrote up a new company called Quirky. We agreed that, pending a little investigation of its IP policy, Quirky seemed to precisely fit the bill of what I needed.
4. When and how did you think up the idea for this product?
I thought of Pivot Power during the summer of 2006, when I was a rising senior in high school. I participated that summer in a 6-week “precollege” program at RISD, the college I would later attend, during which I was an industrial design major. Our final project (yes, even in the summer, we had finals, a fitting taste of the rigor of RISD’s curriculum) was to ideate a product, and to develop it via sketches, models, and presentation. The product I worked on was the same one I would later submit to Quirky.
Jake's school project
5. Had you tried to make this thing on your own already?
I was taking some steps. Because it began as a school project, I had plenty of material to support the idea and tell its story, and as I mentioned above, my discussions and research into protecting the idea, and the landscape of similar concepts and patents, were certainly steps towards a goal. That said, the government fee for a patent to truly protect this idea was at least $10,000, and beyond that, I considered the process of attempting to produce the product alone extremely daunting.
6. What do you think of the final product?
From what I can tell, it really is the best power strip available, and I say this with a true and complete disregard for my royalties from its sale. Not only does it solve a real problem, but it does so in an elegant, even delightful way, and looks better than anything else on the market while doing it. It’s better than my initial idea. Even if it didn’t pivot, the level of fit and finish of the thing — essentially the fact that it doesn’t feel like a creaky, cheap office supply — would still make it the best power strip around. I hope it makes calamari of the Power Squid.
7. In your opinion, what is the most innovative product ever invented?
Please. As if anyone, much less a design student, could ever answer that succinctly. My kneejerk is to say the iPhone, and though it shows amazing inspiration, it feels a little shortsighted: there have been countless earlier innovations without whose shoulders the iPhone couldn’t stand. That in mind, I think I consider Sketchpad, the 1963 project of Ivan Sutherland, to be the among humankind’s most innovative inventions. It paved the way to graphic user interfaces and object oriented programming, and showed that computers could be used for creative purposes as well as it could technical ones. Jargon aside, the takeaway is that it was the 60s, and this guy made a computer screen you could draw on with a “light pen”.
8. What inspires you?
Great computer interfaces; problems well-identified and well-solved; hand-lettered typography, especially if midcentury; things that do one thing and one thing well; Apple, everything about them; the potential to surprise and delight; David Fincher; consideration for human factors; and often, music, especially Radiohead, Boards of Canada, Skalpel, Flying Lotus, Dirty Projectors, Blur, Madvillain, and DJ Shadow.
9. What are some of your quirks?
I’m a graphic designer, but I think that most graphic design comes down to “flat stuff that doesn’t move”. Lemon juice could be my favorite condiment. When I take a shower, I usually face away from or perpendicular to the showerhead. Every night, without fail, I brush my teeth for two complete minutes before I go to bed. I spend more time reading about technology than anything else, but I don’t think books are an endangered species. I clean my room often but make my bed rarely. I know the truth about Shake Shack, which is that it’s the same burger-and-custard stand we have literally hundreds of in Wisconsin, but made sleek enough for New York. I can’t do a cartwheel, but I can download probably anything, and I can do it within two hours.
10. What’s your favorite cereal? Deli meat?
Crispix. Tie between corned beef and turkey breast.
11. Any parting words?
To everyone at Quirky and its manufacturer, thank you a thousand times! I hope all of you realize that you’re in the business of making dreams real as much as you are in product development.
