Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

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Thanks for visiting and please keep in touch? ~ D.T.

Quite often, I get emails from designers giving me information of their great products for sale. While reading these emails, I often wonder, how nice if my Design Sojourn readers could also get an opportunity to buy such great products?

Now you don’t have to wait any longer!

I like to introduce you to a whole new experience at Design Sojourn: Curated Shopping. Also known as curated consumption, this essentially means every month I will hand pick 1 great product and put it up on sale here at Design Sojourn.

In other words, as your creative director and curator, I will source only the best designed products available and recommend it for your consumption pleasure. Not only that, these products would first be personally tested and played with, and if it is up to expectations, it will receive the Design Sojourn mark of approval.

I will judge a product based on a few simple categories: design quality, concept idea, and most important of all, value for money. I always believe, well designed products should not cost a bomb!

To celebrate the launch of this new Shopping experience, we are offering free shipping world wide for our very first product: The SD Card Mp3 Player.

Designed by Sumajin, this Headphones with a built in Mp3 player is hip, fashionable and easy to use. Furthermore, this wireless experience would probably beat out most of those other wired Mp3 players strapped inconveniently to your arm, waist or chest.

But wait there’s more!

The products featured in our Design Sojourn’s Curated Shopping experience will only be available for a limited time (often for a period of 1 month) as they are either limited edition runs or sold at a value that is hard to beat and/or maintained.

For more information on this product and shipping and handling information, check out our Curated Shopping experience page. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask, otherwise do enjoy!

Domus Magazine has recently launched a signature edition offshoot called Domus d’Autore. This first issue, entrusted to Editor-Architect Rem Koolhaas, was designed to allow readers to listen “…to the voice of those who know how to look beyond current confines and have the strength to direct and influence our way of perceiving the city and the spaces beyond it.”

As usual the magazine focuses mainly on Architecture, but Imomus has highlighted one of Rems theories that can have an interesting application in Industrial Design.

“post-occupancy design” — the stuff that happens to design after it’s left the designer’s workshop (and architecture after it’s left the studio) is the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn’t see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive.

Very well put. Furthermore my regular readers would recognize “Post-Occupancy Design” as similar to, amongst other things, what I have been exploring in my Un-p3 Project (Yes it is till happening!). I wanted to create, through the use of materials, an object that reflects this process of “time and decay” and how it can be beautiful, something that I think iPod/iPhone owners lament angrily over when they are clean polishing their shiny screens or chrome backs.

But is this another trend coming full circle?

It is funny. Our shiny PSP/Mp3 Player/Mobile Phone/Laptop products of today seem to prioritize looks over product engineering fundamentals of case-part protection from the environment, long term usability and product life deterioration. Even more surprising, is the fact that these are portable products. Perhaps that is why the protection accessories market is big business? But hey, would you want to use the heavily textured, dark grey plastic Palm PDA of ages past?

Well, my curiosity is piped, and I’m off to get the Magazine…

It has been a good number of months since the I’ve last updated my readers on the status of this project. Firstly though I like to apologize to a few of this project’s supporters for this delay but I have not been idle and was working on it during my spare time. I really was waiting for this time to finally give you an update.

Most of you astute readers would have already noticed that The Un-p3 Project is currently being exhibited at the Dandelion Industrial Design Exhibition. Unfortunately due to the entry criteria, that exhibition is really only for “show”. Therefore I thought to continue and expand upon the “tell” part here at Design Sojourn. This will be a great opportunity for you to ask any additional questions or make comments of any kind. Also I get a chance to explain how I went from the Haptic concept, and came up with the Wave one.

The Un-p3 Haptic concept: For more information see links below

If you missed the original conceptual thinking of this project that I am self-developing in the role of a design producer do take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 first for some background information, especially on the above Haptic concept.

I have to admit that it has been difficult realizing this project and even at this stage we are not totally done. After speaking to more designers about the Haptic Concept, the deeper complexities of my objective of this product’s creation process became more evident. So I wondered, perhaps unsatisfied with the current use of wood, that perhaps I should open my thoughts to consider other forms of craft manufacturing type techniques? But there is this problem going the craft route.

You see the when we look at craft vs manufacturing scale below they are actually polar opposites of each other:

The Haptic concept tends to fall on the more craft end of things, and I would rate the Wave concept as in between the two.

Craft manufacturing tends to focus on one off products or small production runs often hand made, but as a result often suffers from tolerencing and perhaps reliability issues. Mass manufacturing strives on standardization and volume, thus the products will have good fit but you need to sell in the numbers. As the project’s experiment was about exploring the use of craft based manufacturing juxtaposed with an electronic product, we need both small volumes, attention to detail, but still have good part fit.

One day while speaking to some friends working on their design project, I had a “euraka” moment. Why not use a Rapid prototype machine? Not only does it allow me some freedom in design (well almost, the RP machine still has restrictions) but it also allows fairly good tolerancing and part fit that is perfect for building electronic products.

So as I got started and studied the creation process via the Rapid Prototyping Machine, I decided very quickly that I had to designed this concept so that it would be difficult to be reproduced via mass-manufacturing. Undercuts, flat edges, thin walls, narrow gaps, living hinges and surface texture were tricks that came into play below.

The Un-p3 Project: Wave Concept

So there you go, the Wave concept. I have to say though it was a very interesting experience as after more than 10 years working on Industrial Design programs, certain manufacturing “givens” like part line placement or designing for draft have been ingrained in my creative creation process. In creating this Wave concept, it required me to spend a few days re-thinking and re-framing what I know about design for manufacturing before I could even set my mind free. I hope you enjoy reading about this project as much as I did creating it.

So if you had a choice on which direction would appeal to you, if I made a limited edition run of 20 pieces which would it be? Perhaps I may do a 10-10 split? Regardless please do have your say and I look forward to all your comments.

I’ve always considered myself resourceful and entrepreneurial even though I have always been an employee. I’ve always wondered about that? Why is that I don’t see the need to leave my day job to be an Entrepreneur? In reality this post is not about justifying my place in life, but the fact that what people consider as the traditional characteristics of an Entrepreneur is no longer relevant in today’s economy that has the Internet as a medium of information transfer.

Thinking carefully on this issue, I’ve realize that Entrepreneurship is really about a mindset more than anything else, and a successful entrepreneur is more about the definition of what success is. Honestly there is no difference between selling your company to Google for 100 Million and selling 100 pieces of your beautifully hand crafted mobile phone pouches.

Let us now consider my usual slightly deviant, “of the beaten path” view points on this matter.

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Edit: Re-formatted the layout of some text and images.

Yep. There is no point me blogging about doing good industrial design or design theory if at the end of the day I don’t walk the talk and produce something to show, right? Well after starting, stopping, re-starting, hacking and spin drying my ideas, I have finally succeeded in creating sample prototypes of my Un-p3 Mp3 player! Can you say that five times in your head?

Please do check it out after the jump and please leave me all your hard hitting ego killing feedback? No hang on, my ego is fragile so please be gentle? Heh-heh.

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Just kidding! I’m always a big fan of discussing the different methods you can use to monetize your webpage. However there is no use talking about Google Adsense or Affiliate programs if you can’t see the big picture of how things actually work.

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Or the article formally known as Industrial Design 104: Materials and Manufacturing

I did mention before last year and the beginning of this, I had given up on creating my own unique Mp3 (iPod Beater?) player because I could not create a design that was uniquely different than the tons of Mp3 player products in the market. However the idea of this product still floated in the back of my mind. Fortunately, with my recent exposure towards re-newable organic materials and its manufacturing processes, I have been inspired enough to restart this project!

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I wrote a while back that I yet again took the steps in becoming an entrepreneur after failing twice before. What I was actually talking about was my setting up of a not for profit website that focused on incubating, promoting and networking the best Singaporean and Asian multi-disciplinary industrial design talents.

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What is it with funding that attracts entrepreneurs to it, like bees to honey? I’m not sure, but I know I went a little nutty when the “funding” ticket was waved in front of my face.
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Intrapreneurship or Internal Entrepreneurship is fast becoming a big buzz word as companies start to embrace design, innovation and creativity as a strategic competitive advantage. Using the viewpoint that “innovation begins with everybody” as a credo to beat the competition, companies like IBM, 3M and P&G all have their fair share of Internal Entrepreneurs or Mavericks creating value for their companies.

What about Intrapreneurship in Asia? Where Asian companies are notoriously very regimental and hierarchical and where decisions are often made by one person? I like to share my strategies and the path I took as a somewhat successful Intrapreneurer in a very Asian company.
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