Last night, design*sponge’s Grace Bonney starting us off nicely with a short history on the good, bad, and ugly of do-it-yourself since 2004. She along with subsequent speakers, inspired me to evolve and reconsider my own definition of DIY. More than just painting your own fence, DIY is the next phase of fostering creativity and inviting another wave of collaborators to projects. In keeping with the theme, I recorded video of her talk so you can watch it for yourself. Here is part 1 of 3. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, I initiated a project with the goal of uncovering information about how industrial designers process and evaluate the complex, nuanced combination of skills and traits that are thrown at them every time they look at a portfolio or meet someone for an interview. I sent out surveys to senior designers to get feedback that would help students and young designers understand where to focus their energy. After receiving 100 responses, I’m happy to say that this document confirms some things intuitively believed and also uncovers some interesting surprises. How important is good sketching relative to a good personality? As it turns out, they’re neck and neck.

Even though this document uses scores and percentages to organize the information, it’s important to remember that the study is still largely qualitative. With that in mind, I hope you’ll leave your comments and help me start a constructive discussion on what’s important to the young designers for which this project was created.

In an effort to better understand and organize a young designer’s skill set, I’ve initiated a survey to gain insights from industrial design managers around the world. The survey is a brief set of 7 questions that asks design managers to record their preferences when interviewing junior designers. With the insights from this project, I’ll distill the results into guidelines that will help young designers better develop themselves.

If you’re an industrial designer who is or has been responsible for hiring co-op, intern, or junior industrial designers, I hope you’ll participate. If you don’t fit the profile but are still interested in the project, please share it with your team to help me get a diverse set of responses.

Many students outsourced the production of their chairs this year, possibly mirroring a general shift in design away from artifacts and towards ideas. While a very different experience than building the chair on their own, my take on this outsourcing is that the students learn a valuable skill in managing someone else to execute their vision. Ideally, UC will require some projects to be built by hand and some to be outsourced, since both are great experiences for a student to have. Check out a few of the projects here or visit my Flickr page to see a larger set.

I believe no matter what the capstone topic, there is potential for both success and failure. Many of the students uncovered opportunities involving retail, brand positioning, experience design, new business ventures, and more. The product is not always the solution, and this new generation of students understands that. Congratulations to all the new graduates! Check out the full set of photos on Flickr.

Recently, my design director lent me a copy of Carmine Gallo’s The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. This is the second book on presentations that I’ve read in as many years, the other being Jerry Weissman’s Presenting To Win. Where the latter is a better reference, Gallo’s book is filled with inspiring examples, most of which can be reviewed on YouTube. The two books share a lot of the same points on preparation and structure, but there are some nice additions that come out when specifically studying Jobs.

Plan Plan Plan

As with many books on presentation, Gallo recommends that planning for a presentation is best done on paper, not on powerpoint. Jobs is a relentless planner, not a natural. A good presentation answers the questions, “What’s the one thing that matters most?” and “Why should you care?” for it’s audience. I’ll continue to promote this point only until I stop hearing speeches that fail to answer these questions.

Be The Protagonist

Products are not just products, they are solutions to some problem. We designers know better, but too often we forget this when it matters most. Through the lens of storytelling, solutions are the protagonists that save the day. Paint a vivid picture of your audience’s pain point (the antagonist) early in your presentation, always before you present your solution. Finally, end your speeches as Aristotle would, with a call to action.

The Holy Shit Moment

Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Scientist John Media reports, “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things…it does pay attention to an emotionally-charged event.” Plan a holy shit moment by telling a personal story, revealing some unexpected information, or delivering a demonstration that will be a memorable experience for your audience. Make sure you build up to the moment properly and rehearse to make it come off effortlessly.

We’ve always used Bausch + Lomb’s renu contact solution, so I was excited to see the packaging refreshed with new graphics in a clear, textured bottle. As a product, in hand, it’s great. However, there are a few things holding it back from being a truly great piece of strategic aesthetics.

Everything about this bottle felt immediately like a good move on B+L’s part: the clear bottle and friendly graphics are disruptive in a category filled with competition struggling to straddle the healthcare and CPG worlds. Pentagram, the agency handling Bausch + Lomb’s new identity, seemed to find category balance in part through the addition of a nice serif typeface. For more background on the graphic design, read about the work on Pentagram’s site or from the critics at Brand New. Beyond the graphic aspects, selecting a transparent PETE bottle over the opaque HDPE one gives B+L a better sensory experience. The thinner walls of the new bottle make it easier and enjoyable to squeeze. A slight texture prevents it from feeling too stock, and it probably helps a little bit functionally. Finally, a clear bottle works well in the store because shoppers like to see the product they’re going to purchase.

However, all the advantages of packaging contact solution in a clear bottle are erased by the paper box that covers it up. I’m not sure if this is a regulatory issue or if it’s an unwritten rule for the category, but every bottle of contact solution comes in a secondary box (image courtesy of The Dieline). Regardless, Bausch + Lomb may have missed an opportunity for more disruptive innovation and more category leadership. Clear bottles typically cost more than the opaque ones, so why invest the money if it’s not going to help the brand stand out in the store? On the other hand, one could substitute a clear acetate box for the paper one in order to celebrate the bottle inside. It would be a bigger investment, both to spec a clear box and to spend time working in a more integrated manner to make the entire package work together. This example, much like the Dove Go Fresh bottles, indicates that achieving good design today is much more of a management challenge than an aesthetic one. I’m confident Bausch + Lomb will have success despite some of these details, but I think the payoff would have been bigger had they achieved a more holistic vision of how they want people to experience their products.

What I find more interesting are the subcategories that make up each side. On the right side are holistic, random, concrete, intuitive, nonverbal, and fantasy-oriented. The left side is made up of linear, sequential, symbolic, logical, verbal, and reality-based. Take the test and look for interesting highs and lows. For instance, I scored high on sequential but low on linear processing. It’s important for me to understand how this seemingly narrow difference in processing could affect my ability to learn a new skill or digest an important piece of information.

Finally, Brian Westbrook offered up another test called the HBDI. It tests the whole brain: left, right, front, and back. Ned Hermann, a manager at General Electric, developed the test in the 1970s. For more information, download this PDF profile.

Take the quiz, join the Industrial Design group on LinkedIn, and add your comment!

Admiring Dyson’s from afar, I always imagined that part of the beauty was in a “secret” level of detail where the appearance of deceptively simple volumes with tangent intersections were actually more sophisticated curvature surfaces (like an Apple laptop). In reality, they’re really just the simple forms we’d expect. Why do you think this works? Is there something cognitively “right” about assigning this vocabulary to tools like a vacuum cleaner? Looking at the Dyson in person reminds me of Gray Holland’s hypothesis on surfacing can relate to functionality. It will be interesting to see how Dyson products evolve now that they’ve become a lifestyle brand. Anyway, here are the pictures:

Tracy Subisak

Cody Stonerock

Sylvia Spencer

Jeff Engelhardt

Kristen Beck

Dave Heyne

Sam Amis