You scan one to pay at a sari-sari store, pull up a restaurant menu, or board a flight. The QR code has quietly become one of the most universal pieces of interface design on the planet. But it was never meant for any of that. The QR code was invented in 1994 to solve a very specific problem on a Japanese car factory floor, and the engineering decisions made under that constraint are exactly why it later conquered the world.
A barcode problem on the assembly line
In the early 1990s, Toyota's manufacturing arm had a data problem. Tracking thousands of distinct components through production meant scanning barcodes, and barcodes are stingy: a standard one-dimensional barcode holds roughly 20 characters. Workers were ending up with parts plastered in ten or more barcodes just to encode enough information, and each one had to be scanned separately. It was slow, and on an assembly line, slow is expensive.
Masahiro Hara, an engineer at Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, took on the challenge of designing something better. He wanted a code that could hold far more data, be read much faster, and tolerate the dirt, smudges, and odd angles of a real factory rather than a clean lab.
Designing for speed and any angle
The breakthrough was going two-dimensional. By encoding data in a grid of black and white squares rather than a single row of lines, Hara's team could pack in thousands of characters instead of a few dozen. The name they chose, QR for "Quick Response," was a direct promise about scanning speed.
The most recognizable feature of a QR code, the three large squares in its corners, solves the hardest part of the problem: letting a scanner instantly find the code and work out its orientation no matter how the part is turned. Hara's team analyzed printed material to find a black-and-white sequence that almost never occurs naturally in text and images, and settled on a ratio of 1:1:3:1:1 for those corner markers. Because that pattern is so rare in everyday print, a scanner can lock onto a QR code from any angle in a fraction of a second, even against a busy background. It is a beautiful example of solving a software problem with a clever hardware-friendly pattern, the same instinct that drives good embedded and IoT design.
The decision that made it ubiquitous
Denso Wave patented the QR code, but then made a choice that mattered as much as the technology itself: it declared it would not exercise its patent rights, leaving the code free for anyone to generate and scan as long as they followed the published standard. No licensing fees, no permission required.
That openness is the real reason QR codes are everywhere today. An open, royalty-free standard let phone makers, payment networks, logistics firms, and hobbyists all adopt it without friction. When smartphone cameras gained native QR scanning, the infrastructure was already free and universal, ready to absorb a wave of new uses its inventors never imagined.
Why this matters for connected devices
The QR code is now a workhorse of the Internet of Things, far beyond menus and payments. It is one of the simplest, cheapest ways to bridge the physical and digital worlds: print a code on a sensor enclosure and it can carry a device ID, a provisioning URL, or Wi-Fi credentials a phone can read to onboard the hardware in seconds. For thesis prototypes and small production runs alike, a QR sticker is often the lowest-cost commissioning interface you can ship, no display or extra radio required.
In the Philippines, where QR-based payments have become part of daily life, the gap between a clever idea and a deployed product is smaller than ever. The lesson from 1994 still holds: the strongest engineering decisions often look like restraint, picking a constraint, designing precisely around it, and keeping the result open enough for others to build on.
If you are building a connected product and want the firmware, electronics, and web services to work together from silicon to cloud, get in touch with Fluidwire. We help teams take ideas from prototype to production.
