Design Sojourn

Sorry friends. It has been a while since I made contact with anyone via this blog. It was partly due to the fact that I got pretty sick and sadly I still am. It’s one ailment after another in never ending vicious cycle. I cannot seem to shake it off completely. I must be a germ magnet!

Fortunately during my sick leave, I had the opportunity to do some serious thinking and reflection. In particular, what I wanted to do with this blog and it’s role in my life.

Early in January this year, I announced the launch of Design Sojourn Version 4.0. It was a good revamp of the site and as well as refocusing its content. Particularly important was that I shared a new blog description and focus which was “How to master the business of strategic industrial design”.

However at the back of my mind I still could not decide what I wanted to get out of this blog. As it is now 6 months since the last update, I thought it might be a good time to share with you how I see my blog going forward.

I have this bad habit. My attention to things get somewhat shorten due to my very wide and diverse interests. Luckily this blog has prevailed as it is not like the 95% of the other blogs out there that have not been updated in the last 120 days. So I decided to focus my activities to keep things simple and in perspective.

I made a list of in all the things that I did or things that were important to me. I then reorganized a few things and painfully “deleted” the others. In particular, I searched out for synergies in my interests, activities and personal goals. As part of this analysis, I had to asked myself again: Why do I blog?

I felt in many instances that this blog was drifting aimlessly. What I realized was that while this blog had a focus, it did not have a purpose or an end goal. While some bloggers may be happy with this, as in blogging when they feel like it, this lack of purpose did not sit too well with me.

I learned early on that as I have so many things to do, I need to be selective in what I end up doing. Therefore, I needed to be clear why I would invest the time to write and maintain this blog. Life is too short to waste doing pointless or senseless things.

Thus I have decided to evolve this blog into a conversation platform that will lead towards my writing a book called “The Art of Design Leadership” or something close to that.

I find a lot of comfort in this decision, and making it was a lot easier then I expected. I have been blogging for almost 4 years and this blog has more than 500 posts of rich Strategic Design content. Compiling all this time an effort into a book just makes sense to me.

Going forward, my posts will still be a journey in Strategic Design, but it will now have a higher purpose and over arcing structure towards the creation of the different chapters in my book. Finally, in true Web 2.0 fashion, you will be able to interact, feedback, and comment on the book’s content as I develop it.

So with this new purpose in mind, I have spent the last couple of weeks cleaning up my blog with the focus on readability and navigation. I removed “chicklets” that were redundant, reformatted the site to improve logical flow and reduced the amount of ads you would see.

However the biggest change is in simplifying my categories to reflect this new blog direction. Here they are with quick descriptions.

About Design Sojourn: What’s new at the Design Sojourn Blog or what I am up to in my adventures in design. A place to put the more general and non-design administrative stuff like this post!

Design Articles: Pillar and foundation articles on Strategic Industrial Design and Design Leadership that define what Design Sojourn is all about.

Design Leadership: Short reads about Design Strategy and Managing the Business of Design. This new category combines these two old topics in a logical manner that also reflects this blog’s new direction.

Designer Lifehack: Quick tips, hints, random musings and activities that could help make you a better designer. Majority of this content was written during in this blog’s first 3 years, much of which are still relevant today.

Entrepreneurship: Thoughts on my experiences being a design entrepreneur. More legacy content that can still be an interesting read.

Industrial Design: Multi-disciplinary Industrial Design related discussions and critiques. I used to have to have another category called Meta Design, but as Industrial Design has evolved into more than what it used to be, I felt comfortable to use this as a general description for both categories.

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So what do you think? Does this make a lot more sense to you? I am looking forward to reading all your awesome feedback. Thanks in advance and do stay tuned, as regular programming will resume shortly!

Chuck Dillion, a lecturer at The Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia, has sketched a cartoon of the different Design students he has encountered in his 10 year teaching career. Great Stuff! Here are my favorites:

Check out the rest of his great sketches at Blog 30 x 30.

Via: Blankanvas

Image by: tamachanhaazarashi.

Designers these days face a lot of pressure to not only do good design, but also to do the right thing. Indeed the importance of sustainable and environmentally friendly products cannot and should not be underestimated. However, while Designers are central to the creation of these products, it takes a lot more than just having the “Will” to do it.

Experience has shown me that Consumerism is such a humongous engine, with so many factors influencing or controlling it, that a Designer and his “Will” is but a drop in the ocean.

Regardless, Designers are in a good position to influence and often the issue is creating a sustainability discussion that can also be relevant and meaningful to the business and their financials. I would also like to add that this difficulty of translating a sustainable proposition into something that makes financial sense is one of the key reasons why “Green” is not taking off in many companies. Yes, sadly money does make the world go round.

Another key point I like to add is that traditional sustainability discussions are almost the norm these days. Recyclable materials, low impact processes, Lead and toxic free materials, and even end of life management etc. are all achievable and even part of government legislation in many countries. While a lot of products do satisfy such legislations, more could be done. However, I personally feel this is the wrong approach to take, more like a stopgap measure rather than a cure.

Rather than trying to fix a product, why not instead “fix” the buying behavior of consumers? Think about it, the awesome Macbook Unibody that I’m typing on is made out of recycled aluminum, however the amount of power you need to recycle it when you are done, makes this idea of a recycling process pointless if everyone is chucking it out after a year. However if I told you that this was my first computer after my 5-year-old laptop died, well you get the picture. It is not so much about cleaning up after it all, but about getting people to consume less.

This comes to an interesting cosmic alignment.

Industrial Designers are known to be experts in creating products that are a reflection of consumer behavior, or even, as some say, able to influence behavior by creating desire!

So the next time you are working on a design, consider shaping it to encourage ecological and sustainable consumer behaviors. Not only that, if you can add making the designs financially meaningful into the mix, you would have got it sold!

I have to say I’m not an expert in this, but here are some suggestions that might spark some ideas to help you along:

1) Design longer lasting products. Commit to designing and building the best possible product you can, and market the hell out of it! Charge a premium for this and I’m sure this product strategy can still be financially sound.

2) Design Products that are part of an upgradable system. Modular or Lego type systems are great way, for consumers to throw away less as they can now buy what they need.

3) Create products that can be fit into smaller packaging. Design products that can be easily assembled, so they can be flat packed IKEA style. Less factory assembly resources required, more products on a shipping pallet, and hence smaller overall carbon footprint.

4) Products that can be easily disassembled. People seem to forget design for disassembly. Why not create products that can be easily disassembled for re-use and refurbishing back into NEW products? Reused components save costs and landfills.

5) Parts reduction. Simplicity is back in style. This means elegant and simple product constructions with less fuss and less ornaments. Make it in one part or not at all!

These are just some simple suggestions off the top of my head. I’m sure you can come up with more ideas and options that either encourages sustainable behavior and/or makes financial sense. Please do share, as I love to hear about them?

PS: You might like to take a look at this post “10 Useful Cost Saving Design Strategies for these Troubled Times” for more ideas. Cost savings usually mean less materials and thus less impact.

Image from AllMoviePhoto

Wow! The response to the Designer Mentoring Program has been an overwhelming success. Over 30 designers of all levels have expressed interest in taking part. It was a really tough decision and I spent a lot of time agonizing over the decisions. At the end of the day the following designers were selected based on a few simple criteria:

1) The Designers can leverage off each other.
The Designer Mentoring Program is not only about spending some time with me, but will also be a small community of designers with a similar passion and attitude towards design. Part of the process will include interacting and learning from each other in their day to day experiences.

2) The Designers have completed school.
This was a tough one. I had almost as many student designers as there were designers in industry. However, I had decided against student designers for this intake as, unlike graduate designers, student designers still have access to mentors in the form of their teachers.

3) The Designers showed great passion and engagement.
The Designers selected, showed a lot of passion with their work as well as took a lot of effort to ensure that I understood what they were all about. Nothing scored more points than a willingness to improve.

So without further, the Padiwans are:

1) Waikit Chung
2) Ingo Rauth
3) David Emmett
4) Mikkel Holm
5) Eugene Cheong

Padiwans, do check your email in-boxes, as I will be contacting all of you soon with the way forward in this Designer Mentoring Program. David and Mikkel, please drop me an email at dt [at] designsojourn.com so that I can get the ball rolling.

I like to thank all the designers for taking their time to leave comments, sending their portfolios or sharing their work with me. It is plainly obvious that there are a lot of great talent out there, and I’m humbled that you have decided to join up.

I really feel sad that I can’t take in more designers into the program, but not to worry, I hope to to get around organizing more intakes in the future. So do keep in touch, or even better, why not subscribe (via email) to Design Sojourn, if you have not already?