Design Sojourn

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Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin (Amazon link), reinvents work by challenging everyone to be an “Artist” now! (Check out the Linchpin manifesto graphic above for a gist!) This is something most designers should already do well, and then again for some of you maybe do better?

Now, if the man on the street is encouraged to work with passion and artistry, how is a designer, whose work is about passion and artistry, going to do one better?

I have been thinking about T-Shaped Designers for a long time now. How to be one, what does being one really mean and how effective can one be. Made popular sometime in 2005 by IDEO’s Tim Brown, T-Shape Designers are defined as:

…people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. ~ Fast Company

I touch on this topic again in 2007, by calling these T-Shape Designers “Renaissance Designers” in my blog series: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Designers.

However after almost 5 years contemplating the existence of such T-Shaped designers and observing the many designers I know, I have to admit that such a personality trait is a myth. Honestly, to date I have never seen or met any designer that I would truly qualify as T-shaped, including myself.

I actually spoke to Chris Bangle about this and tried to tap into his vast experience as someone who hires talent. He agrees that while it was big in 2005, on one talks about this anymore probably because it was never true.

I postulated that such a personality trait is impossible simply because humans are just not wired to multi-task well, or to wear different hats for that matter. Even if a designer has the capability, he or she will lack the time or opportunity.

Therefore the reality is, instead of being a big “T”, you will find designers that are either a little “t” or a “T” with a short vertical stick.

Little “t-shape” designers are essentially most of who we are. Despite many of us feeling that we are “Jacks of all trades and masters of none” after our 4 years of design school. We eventually settle into a specialty of design and designing.

Stunted “T-Shaped” designers are often the senior creatives, the design managers, team leaders and entrepreneurs. Many deal with all the different touch points in the design development cycle, but do not have the opportunity to dive into detail. Some, like the entrepreneurs, may be in the position to do it all, but often will have to either accept work of lesser quality or learn to delegate and outsource.

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So at the end of the day, being a T-Shaped is just a nice story for designers to aspire to. While the value of a T-Shaped team is undeniable, it is probably more realistic to build a multi-disciplinary team of experts to work on complex (or wicked?) problems. Now that is something that has withstood the test of time.

What do you think? I’m looking forward to hearing your comments.

Michael Bierut of Pentagram and Design Observer fame, has shared some of his words of wisdom collected through his years as a designer. He digs through his 86 notebooks filled with his design work, and distills his thoughts down to 5 awesome design secrets.

If you don’t have the time to watch the 19 minute video, check out Michael’s 5 secrets which I have reproduced below.

1) Listen first, then design

2) Don’t avoid the obvious

3) The problem contains the solution

4) Indulge your obsessions

5) Love is the answer

What I also found particularly interesting was how Michael started his talk by claiming that he is not creative at all. (Shock, horror!) He then goes on to describe himself more like a “doctor” waiting for “patients” to come to him with design problems to solve. This echos my believe that design or creativity cannot exist in a vacuum.

Via: Behance’s 99% Conference

Click image for a larger view!

Thought I might share a quick snap of the workspace that I use for my personal design work. As you can see there are some interesting things that are happening to it.

My desktop computer went in the way of the dinosaurs a number of years ago. I really hated the wires or the floor and table space it took up. Instead, I wanted was a mobile modular computing system that would allow me to work anywhere I wanted. Four laptops later, my latest incarnation is a 13 inch Macbook.

As a result, my Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet is now one of the biggest thing on my desktop. Wholly out of proportion with the size of my laptop. Maybe I was a little ambitious going with the 9×12 (A4) tablet, but it was a legacy product to match my old 17″ desktop monitor or my retired 15.4″ laptop. With the desktop computer now gone, the size of the Tablet stands out like a sore thumb and is starting to annoy me.

Interestingly, even though technology makes things smaller, the size of the workspace we need to work (draw) on remains more or less the same. Guess the Wacom tablet stays!

What about you? Do you have any interesting workspace stories to share?

Here at Design Sojourn, we are always encouraging you to push the limits of your ability and capability in the aim of being the best designers we can be. So this post might come across to you in a slightly different tone of voice.

In a similar discussion, we spoke about consciously putting in the time it takes to be “The Best Designer in the World”. This time we like to encourage you to take a break and watch design guru Stefan Sagmeister take a break! (No pun intended!)

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.

If you can’t see the embedded YouTube player below, please visit the TED page instead.

Taking a breather helps you rejuvenate, gather your thoughts and reignite that creative fire in your belly. It is interesting to note that from Stefan Sagmeister’s talk, taking a sabbatical is not about waking up late and lazing the time away. You need to plan to do some serious creative “work” that can help you grow as a designer.

Enjoy the video, while I go and plan my year off too!

Let’s start with 3 truths.

1) The best place to be is to have a good presentation with good content. Works in any situation.

2) If you have good presentation and your content sucks, you might still get away with it.

3) If your content is great but your presentation is crap, it’s 50/50 split that could go either way.

Right. Interestingly, this was one of the topics we discussed during the Designer Mentoring program. It came up a number of times, so I felt it should be shared here with all of you as well. It is quite a difficult concept to grasp, so please bear with me while I try to explain?

Time and time again I see this issue crop up in Design. Some common scenarios include designers that sketch well (presentation) but produce unusable or poor designs (content), or portfolios that have great layouts (presentation) but suffer from poor image quality or work (content).

The trick is to be able to distinguish between good presentation and good content.

The first thing to do is to not get overly caught up with the allure of technical skills like sketching, rendering or even public speaking. While a certain level of skill is still required, for the sake of argument, lets consider that a great presentation excites the eyes but often fools it.

In this context, what is great content? Great content just works, great content makes sense, great content is timeless, and great content is beautiful (more than skin deep!). Most important of all, great content still works even if it was let down by a poor presentation. Try to look past the presentation and into the core of a design by asking yourself why it works. Be critical with everything. Don’t just look, but see.

Oh one last thing, substitute “content” with “idea” or “concept” and you still get the same results.

I’m always happy to hear of designers that have taken the effort to turn one of their great ideas into reality. I think it is a great learning experience even if the result was a not a success. (Remember you learn more if you fail!) So if you have ever thought about doing the same, I highly recommend that you do so!

I often belief that “Sometimes Designers need to Walk the Path on Their Own”. By “Path” here, I mean the design process, or more specific to my statement, the attempt to participate in the entire design and product development process. In other words, coming up with an idea, creating a business plan, working out the marketing story, developing the concept, refining it, realizing it in CAD, manufacturing the product, testing it, packing it, selling it and even shipping the product.

In our day to day work lives most designers are actually confined to a certain set of activities such as concept development or CAD work. By walking the “path” with your own product, you stand to learn a lot of things that can be beneficial to your career as a designer. For example you start to think of your designs now as a product that has to sell. That means budgeting and return of investments (ROI), marketing plans, consumer behavior studies and even pricing strategies. You will also get a chance to do things like manage shipping and logistics, and best of all inventory control. (Not!) Even refining a product hot of the prototyping machine is a priceless experience.

Eventually you may start to realize that many designers are really not just designers but are instead, what I like to call, Design Producers. Phillip Starck or Karim Rashid are good examples, but Design Managers in organizations also fulfill this role by their ability to work with different departments or competences. In other words, Design Producers are experts in gathering all the required pieces of the puzzle together and then piecing them together to create unique and meaningful solutions.

Industrial Design has evolved in today’s business and consumer climate. It is not just about creating beautiful objects, it requires so many elements for it to be a success that the creative aspect, we all know so well, often becomes but a small piece of the entire picture. As a result many Design Producers do very little hands on Design, even if they are very good at it. But, if you think about it, at the end of the day this is still Design, no?

Image: Yo Yo Ma at the World Economic Forum 2008 by Any Mettler

This article was written for Yanko Design (YD). As I know some Design Sojourn readers don’t really frequent YD, I have decided to republish and keep a record of the article here. Enjoy, and I’m looking forward to your comments if you have not left any before!

Have you ever wondered how you could be the best designer in the world? How to be that money making Design Virtuoso? I know I have. What about you?

I sort of knew what it took, but I never really knew what it took, until today. According to Chris Guillebeau, the man behind The Art of Nonconformity, if you want to a virtuoso, or just be really good with anything (music, sport, design etc.), you will need to invest approximately 14,600 hours of practice or training to get there.

The time cost of becoming a virtuoso—which I’m defining here simply as a measure of extremely high expertise—is about 10 years of consistent training for at least several hours a day. This is the consensus view from a wide scientific literature on virtuosos from various disciplines.

Roughly, this breaks down to 14,600 hours over the course of a decade (4 hours a day, no weekends or holidays). According to experts who study the experts, If you spend approximately 14,600 hours practicing the cello, learning to be a surgeon, playing chess, or doing any activity that has a progressive learning scale and can be evaluated by other experts, you’ll achieve the status of being a virtuoso.

Yes, there are some disclaimers, and the most important one is that you have to have somewhat of a talent at playing chess or cello to begin with. But most virtuosos are not innate geniuses; they are instead highly disciplined individuals.

Extracted from: The 14,600 Hours to Virtuosity by Chris Guillebeau.

Wow. Now you know why some designers seem to be able to sketch, CAD or even design better than others. They have invested the time and effort to perfect their art.

Why some designers are so good?
I am willing to bet that those car designers who are able to sketch or draw so well, have put in serious time into their profession. Furthermore, I will not be surprised if many of them have been already sketching cars before they even got into design school!

Therefore, if you want to be really good at something, you have to first set a goal and then put in the hours to get there.

When I started out my design career, I was an old school designer living in a transition period between 2D and 3D. I had no 3D skills and no job because all the design firms were only hiring CAD jockeys at that time. Therefore I was determined to learn 3D and be the best CAD jockey there was. I made a decision to be very good at Rhino3D, in an environment dominated by Alias and Pro-Engineer.

So I put in the hours, invested weekends, read the Rhino Manual from cover to cover (I kid you not!), and did all the tutorials. Not only that, I searched out every hint and tip there was on the web, and even participated in the Rhino software Beta feedback team. In no time I was churning out Rhino CAD files dead quick and to a quality that was even manufacturing ready!

Passion and Dedication.
Chris talks about Talent being but one of the elements in the equation. I agree, even with design, Talent is nothing without discipline. However I like to add, particularly with design, Passion and Dedication are another two elements of this equation. I find that the two are linked, if you have a Passion for something, Dedication is not far behind.

There is a clear difference with a designer that lives and breathes design vs. a designer that is “oh-hum” about design. Having Passion is not just about loving design, it is also about the dedication to get knee deep in it, and the will to be designing almost all the time. I can relate to designers like Marc Newson who always seem to be critical of their surroundings and never seem to stop wanting to improve it. I can see also passionate Designers taking part in design competitions, creating their own products, or even solving problems outside of design.

It is Passion that is the fuel that keeps the fires burning and the designers going in the wee hours of the morning.

Being a “Jack of all Trades” is Only the Starting Point.
I like to close this discussion up by addressing a big complain I always here from Industrial Designers. That is we end up being “Jack of all Trades, and Masters of None”. Yes and No. The nature of the industrial design profession requires us to cover a lot of ground at school. However learning does not and should not stop when you graduate. When you do graduate, it is now up to you to focus on areas you are either interested in or perhaps areas you want to improve. For example if you start clocking just a few hours a day in sketching, you will soon have 10 hours a week, 40 hours a month and 480 hours a year etc. You see, you don’t have to put in that 14,600 hours to be a Virtuoso (unless you want to!), but anybody can start being better in something when the time is invested in doing so. Best of Luck!

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 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?