Archive for October, 2009
Five Questions for Michael DiTullo
How do you define of good design?
My definition of good design is broad. For me, good design is an object, service, brand or communication that successfully serves humans. There are many examples of good design in the world today. You can even get some pretty solid good design off the shelf from OEM manufacturers.
Great design is more than culturally relevant, it goes on to influence the culture it that created it. Great design kicks good design’s ass.
The more important definition is that of great design. Great design does everything that good design does, but it has a presence that makes good design pale in comparison. Great design is culturally and personally impact-full. Great design leaves an imprint on its owner. It not only creates the desire to buy it, but it also engenders the desire to keep it, use it, and take care of it. Great design is full of little things that you will never hear in a focus group and that you can not measure in user testing. Great design is more than culturally relevant, it goes on to influence the culture it that created it. Great design kicks good design’s ass. I think I’ve done some really very good design, but my goal is to do great design. Luckily I’ve only been doing this for 11 years. Fingers crossed, I have another 40-50 years more of work in me, so I’m hopeful that if I keep working at it, I’ll get there.
What challenges you most as a designer?
What challenges me most as a person is patience. If I had my way I’d design everything. After over a decade of doing this professionally, I am still as excited about design as I was in school. I have a “bucket list” of sorts of things I need to design before I hang up the six guns. I’d love to get a chess set into production, a furniture piece, some small electrics like a toaster and coffee maker, flatware, some more consumer electronics, a camera, a phone, a video game system, a laptop…. OK, really pretty much everything is on that list. I’ve been able to check off a few items on the list; a tea kettle, I collaborated with Icon on a production vehicle that is being shown at this year’s SEMA show, and obviously a lot of footwear. With patience I know I will get to most of it.
Patience is a big part of the game. As designers we have the ability to see, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. We are lucky when we have the opportunity to collaborate with others that have this skill. When we don’t have collaborators with this ability, we have to have patience to find out what their strengths are, what is important to them, educate them, and bring them along with us to better design solutions.
In the context of your job, how do you define success?
I don’t define success as perfection. What I look for is progress. If we can look back on the products that came before and say we made progress with this design, then I feel pretty good about it. It is a very simple and personal measurable. Of course I want to have great
sales, and awards are nice, so are magazine write ups, accolades and other forms of recognition. They all look great on your resume. What really matters is that I feel I in some way made progress.
What has been the most unexpected part of being a professional designer?
One of the things that surprised me the most is how resistant designers can be to talk about design. I was at a design conference in which the keynote speaker was a photo-journalist whose opening line was “I have no idea what industrial design is or why you asked me here, so I’m just going to show my portfolio….”. I have never been to a convention for lawyers, but I bet they talk about law.
Designers can be so eager to learn the languages of business and engineering that it comes at the expense of their native design tongue. In the vacuum of designers talking design, we are loosing ownership of our language. Terms like Innovation, Design Thinking, Iconic, Modern are so miss-used that they are the verge of meaningless.
To be a successful designer it is important to understand how to speak to and influence business and engineering. As designers, we inherently have flexible thought patterns and a capacity for empathy that allows us to do this. As we learn these skills we must remember to educate others about our own language and the value of design.
I read that an article by a designer in a well known global design firm that said “Artifact making is dead”. Humans have been making artifacts since the dawn of our existence. It’s not a fad, it is hardwired into our spirit, as it is hardwired into a bird to build a nest and a beaver to build a dam. We tell stories through objects. We leave things behind for others to examine our lives. Are we proud of them? Can they represent the ideals of our age? Can they embody who we want to be as individuals and as a civilization?
The search for the answers to those questions are what keep me at it everyday.
Five Questions for Geoffrey Baldwin
To understand the meaningful similarities and differences between different types of designers, I’ve started collecting a series of short interviews with a broad range of students and professionals. The first was with Neal Mabee, and here is the second. Geoffrey Baldwin is an Industrial Designer at IDEO Chicago. He is a 2006 graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s Industrial Design program. Prior to joining IDEO, he made the internship rounds at Lexmark, Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Design Continuum, Nike, and The Rockwell Group. While Geoffrey is quite passionate about design it isn’t his first love – that would be baseball. He spends the Spring, Summer and Fall playing baseball all over the Chicagoland area, refusing to grow up.
How do you define good design?
Good design is a balance, it’s about what’s best without being too much. Two phrases that help me are… “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” “A design isn’t finished when there’s nothing left to add, but rather when there’s nothing left to take away.”
What is your favorite part of the design process?
Reduction. Whether its synthesizing research down to one salient insight or embodying that perspective into a simple object, I like simplifying information.
What challenges you most as a designer?
Making things tangible…“Design thinking” has created a lot of interest in “strategy.” Strategy is a fancy word for having a plan and no plan is worth anything if it doesn’t have an outcome. My passion and greatest challenge is having strategic conversations that end with a tangible outcome.
How do you define success?
It would be easy for me to say that success is when my client is happy. But I think making clients happy isn’t that hard, just do what they want. To me success is self satisfaction within the constraints of a project. It’s two questions: “did I help my client?” and “did I fulfill myself?”
What has been the most unexpected part of being a professional designer?
I’ve always been surprised to work with designers who, admittedly, cannot draw. This has been a circumstance I’ve found myself in at several studios and it never ceases to amaze me. In my opinion, sketching is the heart of what design is all about. It’s as much about imagination as it is about hard details.
Thanks, Geoffrey. Please check back to see how other designers have responded to these questions!
The Best (and Easiest) Advice on Sketching
I’m preparing to give my Design Communication students their first sketching assignment. With that, I’ve been trying to give them the best advice possible for how to improve their skills. I asked my friends on Twitter, and got a ton of responses (thanks!). It occurred to me that there are a lot of small pointers and advice that people have to share, so the most actionable advice will be memorable and easily digestible. Here it is:
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Always Warm Up.
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Always Pin Up.
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Always Cheat.
Always warm up. Have you ever played a sport or a musical instrument? If so, this advice instantly makes sense. Whether you’re running a 5K or playing the clarinet, you’ve got to loosen up to perform your best. When you warm up and “stretch,” you prepare both your muscles and your mind. I prefer a warm up I learned from Scott Robertson, which has me drawing at least a page each of straight lines, ellipses, and circles before I dive into something (yes, I still do this at work). Warm ups succeed because they completely separate designing from drawing. The repetition is therapeutic and allows the mind to begin thinking about ideas before having to commit them to paper.
Always pin up. Technology has allowed some people to work almost exclusively on the computer. While this affords many benefits (control-z, less paper), it challenges designers to consciously hang up and share their work. There’s something magical about hanging your work up on a wall. Unlike viewing it on your desk, perspective errors become clear, the use of contrast makes sense, and your best designs often jump out at you. When the entire studio hangs work on the walls, they share their successes and failures, improving together.
Always cheat. Cheating can mean emulating someone else’s style, tracing an underlay to understand perspective, or copying a product detail to better sketch it from memory. Don’t confuse copying a sketch with copying a design; learning through replication is different from plagiarism. Many designers avoid these things in favor of developing unique habits, but in reality they’re slowing their pace of improvement and missing out on opportunities. “Don’t think tracing is cheating; it’s a skill, says designer Sam Amis. “I was always afraid to, until I realized I was being stupid not to.”
These are my three easy rules for improving your sketching skills, but there are many more. A few others are: stay positive, sketch everyday, and choose one: ideate, communicate, impress. What is your best piece of advice?
Peter Merholz’s view: Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You
Harvard Business published a nice, if somewhat controversial, article by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz. His viewpoint challenges the current popularity of “design thinking” and reminds us that each discipline brings value with it’s approach. To throw out other forms of thinking in favor of design’s is limiting. Here’s an excerpt:
Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.
But talking about only “design thinking” and “business thinking” is limiting. Me? My degree is in anthropology. And a not-so-secret truth about “design thinking” is that a big chunk of it is actually “social science thinking.” Design thinkers talk about being “human-centered” and “empathic,” and the tools they use to achieve that are methods borrowed from anthropology and sociology. Believe me, until very recently, they didn’t teach customer research at design schools. In fact, when I began working in this field, the practice of design was remarkably solipsistic — I’d have to harangue designers to care about the person using what we created.
I think that many designers are still solipsistic, although maybe less so than in the past (thanks for the vocabulary lesson). When was the last time you heard “design is a powerful tool; design can completely change the way we look at things”? I recently read Super Crunchers and those same statements, for me, are true for number crunching. Merholz’s point is a good one, which says that design has just as much value as journalism, anthropology, business, and other disciplines (calligraphy?). In my mind, the best people I’ve worked alongside are “integrative thinkers,” sympathetic to the value brought by people from a range of perspectives.
Check out the full article.
Don’t Design A Logo: Five Self-Promotion Rules Industrial Designers Should Break
This article was originally written for and published at Product Design Hub. If you’ve already read it, thanks! If you haven’t, check out the conversation going on at Product Design Hub’s site.
So you just graduated this past spring, and now you’re looking for a job as an industrial designer. Times are tough, but you’re pretty confident in your work. You wish you had some connections, but the couple internships under your belt will only get you so far. First things first, you’ve got to build up your network. So you designed a “sweet” logo, started a new blog and twitter account, and bought a great new pair of glasses to interview in. You’re all set, right? Think again. Most of your peers are doing the same things, and your best chance to make a good impression is to stand out from the crowd. Here are five popular methods of self-promotion that I challenge young designers to reconsider.
Don’t Design A Logo
…Especially one that uses your initials. I’m not sure why we do this, but industrial designers feel a strong need to brand themselves with a logo, and they typically involve our initials in some sort of ligature. Because the majority of us aren’t good graphic designers, these logos typically fail to make the impression we’re hoping for on our websites and portfolio covers.
Instead, borrow a page from the 2D design playbook: type your name in a simple, classic font and let your work speaking for itself (like here, here, or here). Now that you’ve saved yourself a few hours or more, why not do something more productive for your portfolio? Enter a design competition, back sketch one of your old projects to make it more current, or learn a new piece of software. Whatever you do, make sure you’re investing your time towards something that helps you be a better industrial designer.
Don’t Write A Blog
Last time I checked, designers spend most of their time drawing and visualizing ideas, not writing about them. There are plenty of good reasons to start writing about design, but before you do, ask yourself why it matters to you. Blogging is popular and easy, but unless you’re a writer (and most designers aren’t), you can probably find some better way to promote yourself or refine your point of view.
Spencer Nugent, co-founder of IDsketching.com, offers this advice. “Think of something unique you can bring to the table. One of our most unique and popular posts was on microwaving prismacolor pencils to keep them from breaking. That post alone brought over 10,000 new visitors to the site. Stick to your guns and be prepared to defend your point of view. You’re putting yourself out there for EVERYONE to see. Not everyone will agree with you, so you have to be prepared to stick to what you believe in.”
If you do decide to write a blog, “post about topics, not yourself,” says Nugent. “We try to post things that people will find interesting. Sometimes we post about ourselves, but we try not to. Again, pick a theme, or concept for your blog and stick to it. Your blog is a design project too!”
Don’t Follow Me on Twitter
Twitter has exploded over the last year, so it isn’t a surprise that you’re on it, searching for the best designers to follow. Don’t rely on Twitter to make meaningful connections, because you’ll just be one in a hundred people following me. I’m not even that popular. Follow someone more popular and you could be one in a thousand. When you have this many followers, receiving messages could be more of a nuisance that anything else, and that’s not the impression you’re after.
Instead, consider commenting on my blog. More specifically, ask me a thoughtful question. It shows that you take the time to read the content and engage in a conversation that isn’t ruled by abbreviations and a specific number of characters. Even better, get me to follow you or do some fantastic design work deserving of a blog post! Remember, social media tools help you network with people, they won’t do it for you.
Stop Wearing Pumas
I can spot a young industrial designer from 100 yards away. Here’s the look, top to bottom: Eccentric eyewear (optional), simple graphic tee, bold watch and/or belt, relatively dark denim, and Pumas in a bold colorway. Don’t get my wrong, Puma makes some great products and I’m really just picking on them as an example. There are a few other designer stereotypes, one of which probably comes to mind for you. I don’t like the way designers so quickly adopt their own stereotype. We tell our clients to differentiate themselves, but we can barely do it ourselves!
We lose credibility when we can’t walk the talk. What we wear says a lot about who we are. Let’s be designers, but be ourselves too. If you don’t care about fashion then your work can speak for you. If you’re one of those people, you should at least consider buying a pair of tailored, non-pleated pants.
Stop Saving The World
…Unless you actually are. Designers have identified that their skills can help people beyond the mass markets of the first world, but we’re far from making a big impact on our own. The truth is, some designers like talking about making a difference more than they like actually doing it. Raising awareness is only a small first step towards fixing one of the world’s many problems. If you really want to make a difference, think about volunteering at a soup kitchen…or moving to India.
Ramsey Ford is an industrial designer who recently took on this challenge by moving to India and starting the non-profit Design Impact. “Last year, I attended the ‘Design for a Better World’ conference at RISD. What struck me most about the conference was that the common thread was not design, but entrepreneurship. The mantra for the weekend seemed to be, ’shut up and do it’.” Ramsey plans to make a real difference by gaining empathy for India’s true design needs. Admittedly, this is pretty bold, but what have you done lately to design a better future
I hope this article challenges you to reconsider some of the more popular methods for creating a personal brand. Before you pour hours of work into any project, think about your key strengths and what makes you stand out. Choose projects that will help show those off. After that, if doing some of these things still makes sense, then go for it. But seriously, don’t design a logo, especially one with your initials.
Why Isn’t Oktoberfest in Oktober?
Why isn’t Oktoberfest in Oktober? That’s what we asked ourselves while brainstorming themes for our upcoming party. Cincinnati has a strong German heritage, so we thought it would be fun to try and extend Oktoberfest for a little while longer by inviting our friends over to celebrate our 20th anniversary.
Here are the details:
Kaleidoscope OpenHaus. 205 W. 4th ST Suite 900. Cincinnati, OH.
October 22 from 4:00-??? (gotta have the questions marks)
On Twitter
- It's cute when people get on board with social media and start sending you articles about it. 1 week ago
- It's cute when people get on board with social media and start sending you articles about it. 1 week ago
- Skin crudo with raspberry coulis! 1 week ago
- Skin crudo with raspberry coulis 1 week ago
- Like! RT @Behance: Dotted with kaleidoscope images, this flexible planner allows you to "create your own week." http://cot.ag/bzAkW6 1 week ago
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