Design Sojourn

Originally Published July 09, 2006, edited and updated.

It is not necessary, but if you are interested in the background of this article, do read Part 1 first.

Here are some strategies I have found useful and successful in managing and fostering design as a business strategy in an organization. It should not matter if you are an in-house employee or an external design consultant the processes and thinking are the same.

Designer in the lead
Unless you are reporting to a designer, you will need to take the lead in the creation and development of a design strategy. This is simply because no one understands the design process better than you. Convincing the business to listen to you is the problem.

There are a lot of “fly by night” managers who think they know how it is to be a product designer or design strategist, after creating (I would not even say designing) a few products. Personally, the smart ones I respect know that they need to hire trained designers to help them. It’s similar to the perennial problem in Asia in that everybody thinks they are an Interior Designer. Building contractors, furniture retailers, real interior designers, and architects all seem to be able to do Interior design. Yep, just like Industrial Design there are some more qualified than others.

So if you have decided you want to take on this role, it is likely you will have more responsibilities outside your general designing job. Therefore you should ask yourself if you want to do this? On the upside, you will start to understand the bigger picture, become a better designer and you will find you will actually stop complaining about the management’s lack of understanding or respect for a designer!

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In 2006 I had the opportunity to have, in my possession, a Drawing Tablet and Tablet PC. Together with my Sketchbook, I published a 5 part series on the Pros and Cons of using a Sketchbook, Drawing Tablet and Tablet PC for your concept sketching or design work. Here are the 5 parts, each focusing on a particular aspect, compiled all in one place!

Concept Design Equipment Shoot-out: Part 1 : Introduction

Concept Design Equipment Shoot-out: Part 2 : The Equipment

Concept Design Equipment Shoot-out: Part 3 : Portability

Concept Design Equipment Shoot-out: Part 4 : Ease of Use

Concept Design Equipment Shoot-out: Part 5 : Design Work Flow and Conclusion

Since we are talking about sketching, these articles might help you get your sketching off to a flying start!

Do I have to be able to draw well to be a good designer?

Tips on how to improve your drawing ability.

Sketching is officially BACK!

Great write up by the people at Core 77 on how the “The Best Design Policies Are Local” which includes a great collection of speakers reflecting on their efforts of Design in their home countries. What struck me was the presentation by Song Weizu and how China is using design to shape the growth of their manufacturing industry. I have long respected China’s attitude towards design and their hunger to learn. Check out the Song Weizu’s excerpt, which also very much reflects my thoughts on Chinese Design.

Design as a Lubricant for Industrial Growth
Song Weizu is the secretary general of the Beijing Industrial Design Promotion Organisation. Weizu is not a designer, but a very committed civil servant, and that defined his entire presentation.

His vision was the state vision — design is a lubricant for industrial growth — yet it was strangely refreshing to have it spelled out so clearly and to hear a detailed overview of what is actually going on in the Chinese design world, purely in terms of implementation and numbers.

His talk was also revealing. The economic crisis has demonstrated to China that simple production for Western countries is not enough. China wants to create its own products and industrial design is therefore more crucial than ever. They now have 500,000 design graduates, but “we still need to learn.” China is working on a design policy and design centres are sprucing up all over the place.

Weizu was not hiding the facts. The good stuff was there, but also the bad: “We are still behind”. His honesty was appreciated and made his talk — given the big numbers of Chinese demographics– even more powerful.

“We are heading for a quantum leap in the next five to ten years.”

The West is inundated with cheap Chinese design, but China has a wonderful and deeply historically engrained design sensitivity. We just dont see it very often outside of China.

This will change. The Beijing Olympics were a striking example of what the Chinese can do. Take a look at the website. Check the opening ceremony again. The design was spectacular.

We in the design community often tend to think of the world as consisting of a Western sphere that is superior in design, and China/India as the factory. Weizu’s discourse highlights how wrong we are.

How do we engage with the Chinese design culture? How can it become a win-win for both? How can a design policy relate to this?

Check out the full review of the “Shaping the Global Design Agenda” Conference on Core 77.

Edit 1: Originally published 08 June, 2006. Edited and updated.

Can you actually quantify something so subjective and intangible as a design or an Idea? Can it then be used as a foundation to tell you if its a good design/idea or not?

As someone who base most of my decisions on a “gut” feel developed through years of experience and critical insight, this quantifying concept really got me thinking…

It must be fate, as I had this topic broached to me twice in a day.

The first was an interview I conducted with a pleasant fellow who was extremely passionate about applying logic and quantifiable methodology in the selection process of designs and concepts. Apparently in very big companies like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, and Dell, such methodology is common place. Makes sense as it helps justify the subsequent huge manufacturing and marketing investments.

The second time was this article at cph127. The gist of the article was:

How do you measure the effect of design from a business point of view? How do you know that design played a role in achieving business success?

Combining the two instances together we actually cover all aspects of this idea of “measuring” design. The first way is to use these methods to help designers select the right design during the concept phase within a corporate environment. The second method, as highlighted by the cph127 blog, checks to see if the designs have been successful outside of the corporate environment after it is launched.

Either way I think as designers we need to be careful.

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Post originally published on May 27, 2006.
Edit 1: Updated with new written copy, updated links and images.

Squiggle by Damien Newman

Years ago…kidding, about 2 years ago I published this awesome little representation of the design process created by Damien Newman from Central Office of Design.

Lovingly called the “Squiggle”, it seems to have found a life of its own all over the place. Don’t you just love the Internet? Damien has since released it under a Creative Commons License.

We really need more of such design process diagrams or visualizations. It helps brings to the table a certain level of clarity and succinctness rarely seen in the difficult client education aspect of our design business. Thanks Damien!

Via Noise between Stations Blog.

You start with the light blue frame and move towards the dark blue frame which represents a completed product.

I have been pondering over the new Macbook Pro’s “Unibody”, with my thoughts often sliding from sheer audacity of execution, to disbelieve, to the wonderment of who got threaten at gun point, and then finally going back full circle.

But as I thought more about it, I suddenly realized that this was probably one of the best examples of a new school of thought of Industrial Design that I observed about 5 or more years ago. First finding its roots in the furniture/interiors industry (those guys can really experiment!), it has now finally come to main stream consumer electronics with the new Macbook. In short Industrial Design has evolved into a holistic expression of “everything” that is required to create the product. Expanding on this, the Industrial Design of these products were inspired by the product’s manufacturing processes or materials and specifically designed to express it as much as possible.

But wait, there’s more! [ more ]

Being the Multi-disciplinary sort of designer, I was highly impressed with Monocle when I picked it up at one of my better newsstands early last year. Therefore I was very please to discover Monocle as a video podcast on iTunes and free to boot! Produced with equal quality and refinement as the magazine, the video podcasts are great “snack” for your latest culture fix.

Link to Monocle on iTunes.

Originally published on 20 April, 2006.

In my 3 years of blogging, this has to be one of the biggest topics I get asked advice for, especially from graduating designers. So I have decided to compile the 10 things they don’t really tell you in school or anywhere else for that matter! These tips are based on my own personal experience and from other design professionals or HR professionals that I have worked or and spoken to.

1. The 10% reality
I think this has to be the biggest tip in this deck, so it’s right at number 1. Sadly it is not positive, but a “reality check” that nobody likes to talk about. Here we go, only about 10% of any graduating cohort will find a job right out of school as an industrial designer. Many fresh graduates need to come to terms with this first before they can move on in life. How to move on? We’ll see below.

Many design graduates still do become successful but in other design or non-design related professions that better suit their skill set. I have designer friends who become owners of their own Interior Design firms or CAD businesses, or some even get into marketing. I also have ex-designers who are successful bankers, writers and even a musician somewhere. As you can see, you may not end up doing design; you still can be successful in whatever you do. An ID degree arms you with problem solving analytical skills vital in any organization or business situation.
These days, design management and creative thinking is in itself a very fast growing sub-set of our design profession. Something you might be interested to explore.

For the record, I was not in this 10% graduating cohort. I ended up just outside of it.

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(This post was updated and edited. The original was published on the 19 Dec, 2005!)

John Maeda, formerly from MIT Media Labs, and now RISD President, spoke about how “good art makes our mind blink”. John was referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink with his art comment.

This is so true, and if we further extrapolate this, I would say “good design makes our mind blink”. In a “blink of an eye” we intuitively understand it, we know what it does, how to engage it, and best of all how to use it.

Intrigued, I manage to get my hands on Blink, and while it often comes across rather academic at times, it does give a better understand of how to harness the power of intuition, or what the author calls “rapid cognition”, in decision making. Designers can benefit from this, especially when our ideas get weighed down by constraints that often makes our concepts drift listless from specification creep.

Via: John’s blog.

Here’s a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s site.

Image: Happy 3rd Birthday by Laura-Beth

Wow I almost missed it yet again!

Yesterday, November 09, was Design Sojourn’s 3rd birthday. It has been 3 great years of blogging and to mark this event it I have been thinking about what I should do to celebrate it with you dear reader.

Oh before I forget, I would like to extent a big “Thank You” for all your support, comments, or just sharing this journey of design with me. Recently, I have not had too much time to really keep up with my commenting and keeping in touch with all of your emails, but fear not, I do make sure I read every single one!

Ok back to this celebration!

I had come up with a whole bunch of “hair brained” ideas. From drinks on the house, viral memes, link farming, practical jokes, crazy prize giveaways, and even collecting donations for charity. Many of these ideas, have been done before, and the result was always the same. Some kind of self-glorification short term traffic boost, which seems to me a pointless exercise and something against the spirit of blogging. Done often enough is something I find very annoying as it does not really add to the blogosphere but spam it.

A while ago, I had a discussion with an old design lecturer on the pros and cos of blogging. One of the points we though about was the medium was a chronological one and there was no way to really index or keep track of your work from the past. Blogs will be great education and learning tools if it only had a glossary of some kind!

With that in mind, I think what I will do this Birthday month is to look back at some of Design Sojourn’s best articles, created when the site was just a new seedling with very few readers, update them with new information or data, and republish it for all to enjoy.

So do stay tuned for some hard hitting Industrial Design posts!