Michael Roller

UC Industrial Design Group Projects

This summer, DAAP’s fourth year industrial design students undertook a group project to create a family of products. The products ranged from soft goods to housewares, with the overarching emphasis on creating actionable brand principles that translate into engaging executions. Overall, the quarter was a success, with students presenting these final boards. In addition, I’ve stressed the importance of the verbal presentation (to upper level students especially), and they all delivered enjoyable and informative speeches.

Launch by Michael Kandel, Sylvia Spencer, and Tracy Subisak

Nomad by Ed Mangum, Nick Rudemiller, and Max Schlacter

Cargo by Alicia Abend, Megan Meyer, and Jessica Wilson

S2 by Carly Hagins, Andrew McCarthy, and Sayaka Tsuda

Chimera by Cassie Cropper, Keith Messer, and Justin Wagoner

Gem by Amanda Deininger and Amanda Starnes

Drop by Steve Nelson, Aaron Ricica, and Michael Snively

Dirty Dishes by Chad Hodge, Jacob Nitz, and David Saldoff

Tags: student work, teams

How to Win a Design Competition

Whether you’re trying to win some money, gain exposure, or just build out your portfolio, design competitions are a great way for young designers to develop themselves. Over the past few years, I’ve entered many competitions for many reasons. I’ve even won a little bit. From my experience, here are the five keys to winning the next design competition you enter.

1. Enter for the Right Reason.

Why are you entering a design competition? Before anything else, make sure that you’re doing it for the right reason. Is it to get yourself more exposure or to make money? If you’re trying to get more exposure, consider the other options and compare the possible value of each. Starting a blog, becoming more active on twitter, or just promoting your own concept product to sites like Yanko Design could be more beneficial. Think hard about entering the competition just to make money. What if you don’t win? Go for freelance work instead.

The best reason to enter a design competition is to build out your portfolio, keep your skills sharp, and experiment outside of whatever professional work you do. The chances of winning can be pretty slim, so the exposure and prizes that come with success should be seen as a bonus, not the goal. Design competitions are about some form of self-improvement.

2. Pick the Right Project.

You’re about to invest a bunch of your personal time into this competition. How do you pick the right one? Again, the answer to this question should be form of self-improvement. There are a ton of opportunities, so make sure you pick a project that will make you a better designer even if you don’t win. When I was a student I entered one of Design Engine’s Photoreal Competitions. It was a great way to do a great rendering for a product I’d already designed. In the end, I was able to use it in my portfolio. Later, I entered Scion’s Floorplan Competition to experiment with environmental design. I didn’t win either of them, but entering both competitions helped me improve my skills.

3. Be Passionate.

Why would you enter a competition if you weren’t interested in the project? Building off key #2, you’re about to spend a bunch of your own time towards this. Designers live off passion and die by apathy, so don’t waste your time on something if you aren’t really excited about it. Plus, who do you think has the best work, the best chance of winning, the best exposure, the most success? Once you’re passionate, everything else falls into place for a designer.

4. Make sure you can do it quickly.

A lot of students ask me how I manage personal projects and design competitions in my free time. You might disagree with this point, but my experience tells me the competition you’re most likely to finish is the one you can complete effectively and efficiently. Read the brief carefully and decide if your skill sets are a good match to complete this project in a timely manner. Once you have the passion required (key #3), finish the project before it fizzles out.

One of my favorite competitions was the Bombay Sapphire Designer Glass Competition. Young designers are invited to create martini glasses inspired by the well-known gin. The brief is easy to follow and I was able to create a finished concept over a weekend. As a result, I entered three years in a row (eventually winning finalist & second prize honors) because I was excited about the opportunity and able to complete the project quickly. Follow this rule, your family and friends will thank you for it.

5. Find a partner in crime.

If there’s one final thing that will help you, it’s a close friend that shares the same excitement for entering design competitions. You might encounter a lot of naysayers in your quest for design honors, so friends act as as support network to help you maintain your energy for a project and help you refine your work by giving you an outside opinion. Think of them as your design competition creative director. They should give you helpful feedback to make your project the best it can be. Your friend can carry you when your passion wanes, and if you enter together, the projects can come together quicker than if you entered alone.

Two of my partners are Brandon Lynne and Finn McKenty. Brandon and I worked together in school at UC and we’ve used these competitions as a way of staying in touch and working together. Finn and I collaborate on projects at Kaleidoscope, where he has a design background but now focuses on business strategy. With both partners, our points of view overlap enough that we are efficient but different enough that when we work together we do better work than any of us could do on our own.

Even if you follow these five steps perfectly, I can’t guarantee you’ll win every competition you enter. However, putting yourself in the position to win is all you can do. The rest is a bit of luck, in the hands of the judges and their personal biases. Remember that the value to you shouldn’t come with winning, it should come with entering. If you want more information, check out Coroflot’s article on the subject. Have you had success entering design competitions? What other tips do you have to share?

Tags: concepts, experimentation, philosophy, teams

Four Essential Members of a Great Design Team

Have you ever wondered why you can successfully collaborate with another designer in your office? Maybe you share similar ideas, but there’s also a good chance you’re nothing alike. At Kaleidoscope, some of the designers (including me) are organized and analytical. Others think freely and contextually. How can we coexist? My analytical thinking pushed me to break down and understand how these differences can be complementary. What I ultimately realized is that a successfully diverse design team requires four key members.

The Evangelist

A design team without a visionary leader is like a church without a preacher. The Evangelist focuses on design at the highest level, developing strategies and processes that push the limits of design and business as a whole. Contextual thinking helps him understand how design fits into a larger business plan. As a former Dreamer, he loves to push the boundaries and question assumptions of the products and categories he leads. The Evangelist won’t ever be an operations specialist, and may even lead activities that feel counterproductive to more analytical thinkers. Although possibly his greatest challenge, he will come through in the end and prove that his dreaming offers real business value. With a great Evangelist leading the charge, firms can be proactive, trendsetting, and highly valued for their ideas.

The Conductor

To complement the Evangelist, every design team needs a leader who directs the finishing touches on each project. The Conductor’s analytical mind helps her to ensure that no detail goes unconsidered. Like directing an orchestra, she brings together all the little details into harmony, making sure everything has been figured out and nothing taken for granted. She probably has the highest standards of any designer in the office and ensures that every project is top quality. Often the team doing the first 95% of the work is exhausted or checked out by the end, and the Conductor plays a key role in making the final push to finish the project right. In more corporate roles, she shepherds projects through to production and defends key design details that might otherwise be lost. The Conductor may wish she was still a designer, struggling to find the appropriate level of feedback or adding unnecessary work for her team. At her best, the Conductor is the key to creating consistently solid work that will have clients or consumers coming back for more.

The Dreamer

When analytical minds struggle with paradoxical design constraints, the Dreamer cuts through it all to offer a surprisingly fresh attitude. He avoids the technical boundaries of a project in favor of contextual experimentation. A great design team deploys Dreamers to brainstorms where blue sky thinking is necessary, and keeps them involved when the end product must push category boundaries or create brand new ones. The Dreamer becomes easily frustrated when not allowed to exercise fantasies, so don’t expect him to handle detail-oriented work or anything that is heavily constrained by technical requirements. The wild ideas he contributes won’t always become part of the final product, but the Dreamer is essential in setting the stage for innovation as well as offering an entertainment value to novelty-seeking design managers.

The Surgeon

Whether it comes down to aesthetic or ergonomic excellence, so many great pieces of design rely on details. A great design team relies on the Surgeon – an analytical thinker who cuts up and dissects design problems to find the best solutions. By definition, she breaks down a product into its components, considering the pieces of design and then reuniting them into a cohesive whole. The Surgeon isn’t always the best decision maker, because she can end up thinking in circles or frustrated by a project’s lack of clarity. When it comes to making sense of complex design problems, a Surgeon is your best bet to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The Jack of All Trades (Master of None?)

Every team has designers with diverse skill sets, but the Jack of All Trades might be the most talented person in your office because he can truly do everything. He leads a range of projects, solves tricky problems, and dreams up big ideas. Recent graduates make great “Junior Jacks,” because they can contribute on a variety of levels while they gain experience and become more aware of their greatest strengths. Don’t confuse a real Jack with someone whose strengths are not prevalent or ambiguous. In reality, the rare Jack of All Trades might not be essential to have, but will feel essential to any team that has one.

I hope this helps you make better sense of how you and the people around you fit into a design organization. How well do the designers you know fit into these buckets? How could this concept be stronger? In coming posts, I’ll look at how different combinations of these five members help execute the different strategies that design businesses use.

Tags: business, strategy, teams

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team lays a great foundation for how all teams should interact. Like so many good business books, you can read the whole thing on a long flight. The book walks through a “leadership fable” in which a new CEO helps a Silicon Valley startup become a functional, successful team. Here are the five dysfunctions, along with the leader’s role in avoiding them:

Lencioni creates a framework that is easy to remember and  use. Basically, the author shows how seemingly little problems like a lack of trust quickly turn an organization into an ambiguous place without a shared set of common goals. Without shared goals, employees lack direction and can easily become self-serving of their own egos and careers. My only complaint is the relative negativity in the title. The book itself provides plenty of positive messages, but I wish that the leader’s role in building teams would be celebrated even more. It’s impressive to realize that by simply setting a good example and “going first,” leaders can teach their teams to work through the healthy conflict required in creating and achieving those essential common goals.

Check out Patrick Lencioni’s site for more info!

Tags: books, storytelling, teams