What is a designer? Someone who create something this is functional or someone who creates things that are beautiful and desirable? Is it a designer’s job to create form and function that lasts a long time or is it their job to create something cool and fashionable? Not sure there is a simple answer.(Photo above: Powder Seat by Vittamin, use your snowboard as the seat of the bench. love th idea just £99)
Earlier in my career I've worked with a lot of top designers (both fashion, graphics and industrial) and I understand deeply how they work and how different thinking styles are out there. I often consider myself a designer too. Fashion and design are sometimes unseparatable. From Mark Jacob to Philippe Starck or Zaha Hadid or Bruce Mao... High style design is like virus once you catch it the flu will spreads. Iconic or signature designers have always been the core of the luxury market and they started serving the industry whether it is fashion, furniture or consumer electronic, now industries are serving the designers instead. Here’s when “design” meets “art “meets and “art” meets “fashion” and now “design” meets “business model” (best example is Steve Jobs), a culture industry starving for new icons and now turbo-powered by Web 2.0 + Design 2.0.
What if design is taken off from the traditional definition that used to distinguish high and low style, luxury and mass market, commercial and art, business and art, theoretical and applied? How would that affect experimental and experiential design thinking? Design's intellectual side is tightly linked to vanities of fashion, icons or trends. It is about time to revive design thinking from a long fashion hangover and to embark on a new career. Good design needs not be fashionable (often they are and that's fine). A designer's job is to decide and design the flow, the info, the structure, the tone and style, the touch and feel, the behavior and even the social relationships. We need to stop thinking about designers as artists who live and work in a different universe of cool aesthetics or only belong to art galleries and boutique hotel, let's start thinking of them as creators who decides what is usable, what goes where, which form elements to use and how everything fits together in a coherent experience in a desirable manner.
Just as Tom Friedman wrote that “the world is flat…then so is design--forget other hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough." Design is a “culture” business that deserves experimental exploration in search of new meanings in our every lives and social interactions. Experimental and experiential design is the way that design comes to find its core and to advance its full potentials. Thanks to big thinkers like Sottsass, design today is a new game for young designers / entrepreneur who can bring new experiencial energy into an expanding array of diverse new views and voices.
For those of you who like to shop at Muji (photo of NYC store above), the person behind it Kenya Hara claims 'Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials, it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.' That idea was reflected throughout every aspect of Muji's 'quiet' product line. The market has adopted a sophisticated aesthetic rhetoric: persuasive arguments for poetic minimalism, or Pop-flash, or moral green, or old-school functionalism are demonstrated with masterful execution on a regular basis. Design has matured in its methods, and diversified in its subjects, often to build new markets with aesthetics. This is exciting news.
Coming to the topic of “experience design”, it is a multi-disciplinary domain that rigorously explores the complex social, economic, and psychological problems of modern life . The new MOMA show 'Design and the Elastic Mind' demonstrates the need to provide 'successful translation of disruptive innovation'. It inspires us to take a deeper look at new relationships between emerging technology, social connectivity and users behaviors --interpreting technology into meaning. This is where I get excited and how I see our company is going. Many digital agencies claim that they are experience designers, but they are digital advertising producers at their very core. We’re lucky to attract world class design talents who share our thinking and culture and join us for that reason. Taking about talent, Kengwei just joined Idea Couture as Director of Experience Design. He is one of the 50 smartest people I have on my list to add to our company (sorry, not sharing that list).
Kengwei was born in Taipei, Taiwan where he studies mass media. Then he moved to New York where he attended Pratt Institute for Computer Graphics and Interactive Media and in 1998 he earned scholarship from the Art institute of Chicago. He was recently with CriticalMass. Kengwei's dream is to invite the creative minds of the world to come and play with him and create interactive art. "I love to experience. There are so many ideas there. The question is how big your dreams are and how you can get there".
I asked him about his design philosophy, mottos or things that he believes in?
“I believe in simplicity, form follows function. I tend to forget everything I learn and transfer my leanings into my beliefs so it become intuitive. Although I think I am a right brain person, I do design based on the needs of flow of logics derived from the learnings from every observation of objects. I also don't want to be a smart guy so that I can view the world more closer to the grassroots level.”
I asked him about his D-school experience and what were thelessons learned that he thinks are useful in life?
“Ask 5w and 1h. Be a true believer in self and be humble and always ask what if’. These have helped me grow from one place to another. My motto is "’Design so that we make the world a better place."
I asked him what he considers are the best designs in the world (anything)?
“Apple (itself, exclude iPhone, Mac....). I can't image how well the Apple Inc. has been designed so well that they create admirable things. So I think if we can see Apple, the company, as a product, it is truly the best design ever from every perspective, design, business, brand, solutions, platform..... Others: Helvetica font, iPhone, Internet, Wireless (I wish someday the power could be transmitted wirelessly too), paper (For 5000 years before the computer edge was matured), and the world, if the God is a designer.”
We are very happy to have him joined us. One name off my list :-). Need to get back to finish some work as I am taking an early flight to Chicago tomorrow.
