To celebrate this podcast series as well as The Entertainment Design Masters Showcase, FZD School of Design has generously offered all Design Sojourn readers a 20% discount off the entry fee!

The thing I’m looking forward to the most, is the 4 hour (in total, 1 hour each) design/sketch demo session by the Design Masters. I hope to pick up awesome tips I can use to improve my own sketching and rendering ability. How often do you get a chance to observe the work flow of the Design Masters responsible for the design in movies like Avatar and Transformers?

“Just as a sketch can still convey an idea without being fully rendered, a 3D artist can also use their toolsets to block-out a designer’s 2D concepts in order to explore a design’s form and function. In this presentation I will discuss this process and the diverse range of tools that I regularly use including Photoshop, Zbrush and Maya.” – Alex Alvarez

So if you are in Singapore, do sign up ASAP as seats are running out quick! Don’t forget to quote the discount code: “Design Sojourn” when you sign up to get that 20%. For more details of the event do visit the official Entertainment Design Masters Showcase site.

Disclaimer: Just in case you are wondering, I’m not getting paid for this. I’m just helping out a friend.

You might also have noticed that its “we” in this equation and not I, because the podcast series will be jointly created with non-other than Feng Zhu! Do enjoy and we love to hear your feedback and comments.

During the day she is the founder and principle designer at Echo Visualization, a consultancy that focuses on interaction and user experience design. So over a nice morning coffee (or kopi as we call it here), I asked her what she thought of Bruce Nussbaum’s comment that Designers are moving away from designing products to designing experiences.

Our next little chat is with Bruce Nussbaum, former editor at Business Week, advocate of Design Thinking, and provocateur of both designers and businesses. I was curious to find out if he felt that design thinking had evolved in the 2 years since he started blogging (or talking) about it. Here’s the chat:

I have to say, Bruce in person is completely different from his serious online persona. I really enjoyed our discussions on social media, embracing change, design ROI, and getting that damn free Wi-Fi to work!

Bruce was invited to the Icsid09 congress to interview the guest of honor: Singapore’s Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam. It was a fantastic interview, and testament that design thinking can also be applied in a political context and in policy making. I do no justice repeating it here and encourage you to check out Bruce’s transcript of the interview at his Business Week design blog.

For more information on the Icsid Design Congress 2009 check out the official website.

Throughout this Icsid congress (and maybe after), I will be running a special podcast series where I will conduct a very casual 5 minutes “unplugged” session with a prominent design professional and ask him or her a question related to a pressing concern in design or something to do with the year 2050.

We kick off this series with none other than our favorite sketch god, Feng Zhu, who is well known for his work with George Lucas in Star Wars and Transformers the movie. In our 5 minutes, I ask him his thoughts on the importance of traditional (or technical) design skills in today’s entertainment industry as well as in industrial design.

Sorry about the background noise, the chat was recorded with my iPhone in a very casual environment!

Feng Zhu was a great guy, very knowledgeable and a consummate businessman. It was a pleasure discussing everything from doing business in China, being a better designer, and the future of entertainment.

For more information on Feng Zhu and his Design Studio: Entertainment 2050, check out the official write up at the Icsid congress website.