Design Sojourn

Sorry for that cliffhanger of an ending in that last post, where I announced that I would be leaving Philips Design at the end of September. I like to be a little dramatic at times and I thought it would be a nice lead in to the story I’m going to tell you today.

So what, you may ask, am I going to do next?

I have spent most of my life working for people, or more accurately, designing for other people and making said people rich! Well not really…but I did decide that it was a time for a change. It was time to do something different and, more importantly, something for myself. I decided that I would like to be in a position where I would be able to call the shots and for a change, make the ultimate decision. Central to this plan, as you probably guessed by now, is Design Sojourn.

The Design Sojourn blog has actually been in operation for almost 5 years now! Throughout the history of this website, I have shared my ideas and thoughts on design, bounced these ideas (and sparred) with designers from all over the world. I even helped and mentored designers whenever I could. I hope such efforts have contributed to the international design industry as a whole and in return allowed me to build credibility as a designer.

So it is then logical to expand Design Sojourn into other areas beyond just blogging. I plan for Design Sojourn to evolve into a full fletch design consultancy and brand management company. Yup, I’m going to be a full time entrepreneur.

Here are a few more details:

Design Sojourn The Blog

First and foremost Design Sojourn the blog, will continue, but it’s going back to its roots. This blog cut its teeth by helping designers be the best they can be. Design Sojourn was and is all about “How to do good design, and make clever products”. I did, in recent years, moved this blog into Strategic Design. However by helping designers become more strategic, was still really in the same vein of helping designers be the best they can be. Being strategic is the name of the game in today’s design industry.

I have also taken a look at the state of my blog, and I have to say I’m not happy with it. In the recent years, my heavy workloads and family commitments have influenced a drop in the quality of my posts. I had a shocking realization that the posts people come to Design Sojourn for are more than 2 years old. The numbers don’t lie, and so this needs to be fixed.

As I will likely now have an opportunity to become the master of my own domain, (literally) I will be able to better manage my time to write more useful and engaging posts that will make your visit to Design Sojourn worthwhile. Growing Design Sojourn is high on the priority list, with a target of doubling readership in the next six months.

Finally, now that I am on my own, I will not be tied down nor associated with any brand. I’m now a Design Rōnin. A master-less designer roaming the world and kicking ass! Sorry, too many Akira Kurosawa movies.

Of cause I’m not about to take a “dump in my own backyard”, but do expect a more edgy tone, more rants, and of course, constructive criticism. Not being associated to any brand does provide a lot of freedom.

Design Sojourn Consulting

After everything, the unfortunate hash realities of life still exist. We still need to eat and I have a mortgage to pay. This is where things here at Design Sojourn will start to be a little different.

Many companies setup a company then a blog to get them going. I’ve actually flipped this approach on its head by turning my blog into a company, Design Sojourn Pte Ltd. Here is what we do:

Design Sojourn is a strategic design collective that features a multi-disciplinary team of designers, whom are the best in their respective industries.

We see ourselves as guides or translators for clients and partners in their journey in design.

Anchoring our creative process around the tenets of Joy with Functionality and Simple but Edgy, we offer full end-to-end design solutions that range from design languages that fulfill business needs; to commercially viable and resolved designs; to marketing, communications and new media solutions. However we are also small, flexible and nimble enough to take on that “quick kill” design problem. No job too big or too small.

I can promise you that other than getting a “Hire me” banner up, and an update to my About page, I will not be constantly reminding you of my consulting services. However, in the coming weeks, I will share more about Design Sojourn Consulting and what it stands for. Especially its design process which, I think, you might be interested to see?

If you, or someone you know, need my services or want to collaborate with me, please do not hesitate to contact me at brian@designsojourn.com. I won’t bite, and if something does come out of this, I will be in your debt, as this will allow me to continue to blog, not to mention pay my mortgage…

Design Sojourn Brand Management

The other thing that Design Sojourn Pte Ltd is going into is Design Entrepreneurship. As Design Producers, we design, develop, and produce products under our own brand or basket of brands. We also work closely with awesome designers to collaborate on products from design to market. When the time is right you will know who these awesome designers are.

I’m sure by now, you also know about our Spaces for Ideas brand? Well you will be pleased to know that we have spun the brand off Design Sojourn and given it its own dedicated site at www.spacesforideas.com. To celebrate the launch of the site, we have reduced the prices for the Expandable Sketchbook, so if you have not gotten your Sketchbook yet, do head on over and get one now!

We will also be expanding the Spaces for Ideas product range to include more sketchbook solutions. On a side note, SpacesforIdeas.com will focus more on sales transactions and product information. My sharing of development efforts, as well as the design activities will still be here on Design Sojourn. I’m guessing that you don’t want to be bothered with all this blogging noise when you make your purchases or vice versa?

On Design Sojourn, you can expect some announcements as well as the banners you see now. I’ve dumped the ugly Google ads, and will continue to streamline the site’s design so these ads do not overpower your reading. However, they will be a necessary evil, as Design Sojourn is the main marketing engine for my Spaces for Ideas products. Please do let me know, if you have any feedback on this matter?

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There are a few other things in the works, but they are currently too premature to talk about it now. I’ll let you know as soon as they are ready to fly! All I can say is that they will be quite awesome.

What do you think? Am I out of my mind? Many of you have been part of my own design sojourn right from the start as friends and loyal supporters. It has been a great honor journeying with you and I do hope to get your continued support of this website and in all my future endeavors. Thank you.

It might not come as a surprise to most of you, but this design blogger has an alter ego as a design professional during the day! While it may seem that way at times, especially at 2 am, my life does not revolve around Design Sojourn. I don’t really talk much about my professional work on this blog, as I do like to keep my blog and work separate. Design Sojourn is a blog about my own personal views on design, and not about work. (Seen the disclaimer on the right?) However, from time to time, I make exceptions partly because the information is now in the public domain, and partly because I just can’t resist sharing it!

During the day, I’m actually a Senior Design Manager at Philips Design. I spent most of my time leading strategic design programs in the Philip’s Home Cinema Sound global portfolio. I have also been known to take care of DVD/Blu-Ray players and Remote Control programs as well. In a nutshell, I look after the design activities for most of the peripherals around the TV introduced in the second half of 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Working closely with Creative Directors (or Leads) and Program Managers, my role is to craft design strategies and business focused design solutions that shape meaningful and (hopefully) successful product propositions. I am also responsible for creating a comfortable “playing field” for the design team by ensuring the all the proper budget and operational processes are in place.

Without further adieu, I would like to share with you two of the many designs my team and I have been working hard on in the last two years. The videos of the designs below are part of “Obsessed with Sound” launch campaign and have also been officially released on the Philips YouTube channel. The images are from the Philips Corporate Communications News Center set up on Flickr especially for online media and bloggers.

HTS9520 Philips Immersive Sound home theater with 360Sound

Product in Focus

Campaign Clip

Philips HTS9140 SoundBar Home theater with Ambisound

Product in Focus

Campaign Clip

I hope you share our excitement after watching these product launch videos! At this time I would also like to applaud and congratulate the awesome design team that put their hearts and souls into the designs. Well done guys, you know who you are! So what do you think of our labor of love? I would love to hear your feedback and comments?

So on this really high note, I thought you might like to know that come end September 2010, I will be leaving Philips Design. I won’t go into too much details now, but do stay tuned to Design Sojourn as I will share more about this and my future plans. Talk soon!

A short note today.

During my usual blog maintenance, I’ve decided to create a new category called Design Process. This category is specifically meant as a place for you to locate design process discussions and visualizations that can help you better under our complex design processes and methodology. Design process discussions have always been central to this blog, but never had its own category for organization purposes. It was often embedded in Design Leadership (or Strategy) and occasionally Designing Designers.

So it is about time that Design Process has its own well-deserved category. Check it out here!

A 25-day gap to be exact. 25 days from my previous post to my most recent few. Not to mention that I have been tardy in publishing this post. So what I wanted to say was sorry friends and dear readers. I like to apologize for the slow down and big gap in posting recently.

In addition to my recent holiday to Japan (check out that Tempura, YUM!), my work and life has taken a huge hectic turn. A number of significant changes have happened and I have been caught up in that tidal wave. As such this blog, my labor of love, has been neglected. While my return from my holidays will improve the frequency of sharing, it will still be slow going as I channel my focus elsewhere. This does not mean I have nothing to say, in fact far from that, as my growing list of draft posts is evidence of that.

Furthermore, I’m sure you would have noticed that a number of recent posts have been rather short. While I much prefer the long form blog (more value add I believe), I can only spare time for such small snippets. They are really just “snacks” for your reading pleasure rather than fulfilling main courses this site is famous for. Hopefully these “snacks”, while not as rich, still allow you a small insight into my mind and my daily design activities. Your thoughts and words mean a lot to me and I hope I can encourage you to keep in touch with me?

I have alluded to these changes before, but I have decided to keep mum at this time. This is because things have not firmed up yet and I don’t want to jinx it until the way forward solidifies. And it is getting there. So please bear with me as this roller coaster ride of mine should only last 3 more months or so. By then things can start to settle and I can announce these changes to the world. God knows how eager I am to share these changes with you!

Thank you for all your support and I will be in touch soon.

Image by Plindberg

I would like to take a moment from my daily grind to share something that I have been considering for a long time now. I seem to be doing a lot of that lately eh?

Fellow designers, we need to start getting back to basics. Forget the all that design thinking fluffy mumbo jumbo and embrace the fundamentals of designing; in particular, elements that give rise to good design or clever products.

This call to action is, in part, a reaction to the recent backlash that design thinking is not doing what it supposed to do. However I think it is more accurate to say this call was instead due to a number of life changing events. Events that gave me a lot of clarity on what design should be and what it meant to me. It is not quite the time to reveal the details of these events, but do stay tuned to Design Sojourn as I will get into the gory details in time to come.

Disillusioned with design? No. Focused and reinvigorated, hell yeah!

After spending a number of years circulating through the different levels of the design process (from execution activities to management and strategy), I find it almost always boils down to one thing: good design trumps everything else.

And how do we go about creating these good designs? Making sure that we are armed with a solid foundation of strong design skills and fundamentals.

In the beginning, more accurately Nov 2005, Design Sojourn was about “How to do Good Design and Create Clever Products”. This site contained, and still does, tons of tips and tricks on how a designer can do his/her job better.

In 2007, I added a third focus called “Mastering the Business of Design” to the end of this original blog description. The description now reads “How to do Good Design, Create Clever Products and Master the Business of Design”. Even though it’s pretty wordy, this new description reflected my personal focus on entrepreneurship, as well as a reflection of the commercial aspects of my design job.

In early 2009, my blog evolved in conjunction with my passion and career move into strategic design. The blog’s Version 4 description became “How to master the business of strategic industrial design.” It made a lot of sense as I have always been a very strategic thinker, and this description brought a lot of clarity to this site and also a reflection to what I do in real life.

By middle 2009, I decided to refine the description to a more succinct and simpler: “The Business of Strategic Industrial Design”. Also at this time, I reformatted all the blog’s categories and made it easier and more logical for readers to find things.

So its now early 2010 and I’m putting myself out there to tell all of you that we have made the discipline of design overly complicated. As a result, I often feel designers get detached from design doing when they get caught up too much in the design process.

To live out this call to action, Design Sojourn goes back to its roots by bringing back its original description and blog theme with a little twist: “Creating Good Designs and Clever Products”!

The reality is that designers with commercial sensitivity, a multi-disciplinary approach and a strategic design process are well equipped with the tools to create what we would call Good Design. As they say, a good strategy is all about getting out there and just doing.

I hope what I’m saying makes sense, and if it does not please do let me know? Regardless, I really hope you have been enjoying my journey in design as much as I have sharing it with you. Looking forward to an awesome golden decade of design with you, dear reader!

Edit: Due to unforeseen circumstances this presentation has been postponed to 23 April 2010.

Click for a larger image!

Most long time followers of Design Sojourn will remember I use to blog a lot about hints and tips on “How to be a Better Designer”. Even though these days I blog more about Strategic Design, I still do blog about self-improvement here occasionally, but mainly over at Yanko Design. You can still find much of it here categorized under “Designing Designers“.

Fortunately, I was recently asked by Feng Zhu School of Design to be part of their monthly design forum where they host a local designer to present a topic of interest. They asked me if I would be interested to share my thoughts on how designers can better themselves.

This was when “Designing Designers” was reborn, this time as a presentation!

Here is the synopsis of my presentation I submitted to FZD Design School:

Title of the event:
Designing Designers

General outline of the presentation:
What can designers do to survive in today’s hyper competitive design industry? Designers can and should take the time to design themselves as much as they do their products. Come and listen to tips and tricks, hits and misses, tall tales and short stories from a designer that lived and worked for almost 13 years in the trenches.

Apt event name don’t you think? I aim for the content of this presentation to be in the same spirit as the content here on this blog. So if you are in Singapore on 9th April 2010, you are invited to come listen, discuss, debate, laugh and cry (tears of joy I hope!). Check out the flyer graphic above for more information?

By the way, the presentation will be angled and be made as generic as possible so that designers of all disciplines will find the information relevant and interesting. I look forward to seeing you all!

Edit: Due to unforeseen circumstances this presentation has been postponed to 23 April 2010.

Tiger Dolls by Choo Yut Shing

I would like to wish all Design Sojourn readers a prosperous, healthy and happy Chinese New Year! Gong Xi Fa Chai and may the year of the Tiger bring you and your family bountiful blessings.

It has been a while since I’ve written a quality meaty post here at Design Sojourn and for that I apologize to you dear reader. In the last 4-5 months, I have been experimenting with different types of posts just to see which type of posts works and which did not. To me a post that works needs to not only resonate with you but also with the little time I have due to my work schedule. To top it all off, working on kick ass (I hope) personal projects like: Spaces for Ideas, has caused quality blogging, at least in my mind, to take a hit.

The most astute of all of you regular readers would have noticed that these test posts gravitated towards the type that reflects my time constraints, i.e. short and easy to write. The posts were often on industrial design work, “link loving” (or link sharing), commentaries, quotations and daily photos etc.

However, while I was conducting blog maintenance, I noticed that my meaty posts were bringing back the bacon, so to speak. I discovered that 80% of my most popular posts were Design Articles that were more than 500 words long, with many beyond 800 words. I realized that these longer Design Articles were what defined Design Sojourn in the past, and based on their popularity numbers to date, were what readers wanted.

Interestingly enough, these short posts were damn hard to write, often taking me 20-30 minutes just to proof read a post, simply because I did not like the way I wrote it. I’m known to be anal about details on occasion. So I guess what they say is right, it’s hard to write short posts that are concise. Also, considering the frequency these posts do come up (I just want to share!), it all adds up to the time that I could have used for a meaty post.

So going forward, I will attempt to increase the publishing frequency of longer Design Articles, which is a nod towards quality over quantity. That does not mean that there would not be any well thought out shorter posts on exceptional industrial design work, commentaries or links to great content. It is the Internet after all, and the “world” in there is all about sharing and adding to the conversation.

Some of you may be familiar with my micro-blog The Design of Everyday Things: Todet.com. That site will still be around, but it will not be a source of information anymore. It does not make sense to maintain content on two sites and then asking you to visit both sites when at the end of the day I’m the same author! I respect that you are as busy as I am. However, I will leverage on Posterous’s awesome blog posting system, to help me speed up getting these shorter “appetizer” posts mentioned above published at Design Sojourn.

So with all that, and going into the new year, I love to hear your feedback on the types of posts you have enjoyed here, and the types of posts you would like to see more off?

Thanks for your feedback and have a great 2010 ahead!

Image: Christmas in Love…

I would just like to thank all Design Sojourn readers for their tremendous support and readership in 2009. I have really enjoyed all the comments and experiences you have shared with me, and this has made Design Sojourn an enjoyable blog for all. So thank you very much!

Here’s wishing all you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2010!

This post went out a little later than I expected, but I just wanted to remind all of you that the Icsid congress 2009 is but a less than a week away!

If you are not planning on going, you can keep up to date with the action as I will be Tweeting live from the congress at my @designsojourn or the official ICSID congress @design2050 Twitter accounts. By the way if you can’t up with my Tweets, don’t worry as you can search out the #icsid09 hashtag so that you can review the Tweets later at your leisure! I will also do a full congress write up either at the end of each day or if not at the end of it all.

The highlight of this congress is the Design 2050 studios where we can catch design leaders share their thought leadership on what the world will be like in 2050. In particular I’m looking forward to the Studios by Chris Bangle on Personal Emotional Mobility 2050, Feng Zhu on Entertainment 2050 and Ravi Naidoo on Protofarm 2050.

As a member of the congress organizing committee, I will be at the congress, so if you are going to be here in Singapore next week (23-25 Nov), do drop me a note on my contact page or email me at dt [at] designsojourn.com. I would love to catch up with you for a coffee and/or a chat?