Georg gave a brief introduction about his Company, CRE8 DESIGN,
and himself before moving on to the main topic of the lecture, Cultivating
Failure: Process in product design. He started his career as a stone sculptor
after studying Fine Arts, but later found his passion lies more in design, and
went on to earn a Master’s degree in Industrial Design at a Bauhaus-founded
University in Germany.
His Asian experience started in Japan with a scholarship at
the renowned Tama Art University in Tokyo, followed by a subsequent internship at
Panasonic, in Osaka.
In 2002, he moved to Taiwan, and later joined CRE8 DESIGN, which
was founded in 2001 by he Kris Verstockt. As one of the leading design firms in
Taiwan, CRE8 employs over 35 people from 6 different countries, with 3 office
locations in Taiwan, and 1 in the States for customer contact only. All of
CRE8’s design works are done here in Taipei. Their primary expertise lies in Ideation,
Visualization, Product Strategy, Product Design, Graphic Design, Package
Collateral, Advertising, Branding, Graphic User Interface (GUI), Applications,
Webpage Design, Mechanical Engineering, Sourcing, and Product Development.
However, they mainly focus on consumer electronic products.
CRE8 has already won more than 30 local and international
design awards, including 3 Red Dot and iF Awards in 2012 and 2013 respectively.
Georg introduced some of their very successful designs,
particularly the Steel series- WoW Mouse, which were limited in quantity as
they were hand-made and each mouse was different from the other. This made it a
big hit amongst game lovers, and some even bought them as souvenirs.
He then started the day’s topic by using Apple as an example
of a company that practices good product design. Apple is very successful as a
company because of their design philosophy. Their products are designed in
every aspect, and that design is present in their whole process, which is why
their whole user experience is nice.
CRE8 uses a typical design process – Ideate, Concept,
Prototype, CAD, Final Design. They sometimes skip the concept/sketching phase
and jump right to prototyping in some cases such as mice design, because its a
waste of time. At the ideation phase of the design process, they do intense
group brainstorming sessions. At the concept stage, they do rapid mass
sketching. After some filtering and elimination, the five best ideas are chosen
and some touch ups (mostly use Photoshop) are done on them for presentation to
the client. They then make some quick and dirty prototypes (mostly use paper or
foam). Because the mock-ups show reality, making them prior to doing any 3D
rendering saves a lot time.
Because time is very critical for creativity, CRE8 tries to
convince clients that getting ideas is a long process and there can be no
innovation if the innovation phase of the design process is cut out but most clients
are unwilling to pay for the whole process and want high-speed design.
He then used James Dyson as an example to illustrate this
explaining how he made over five thousand prototypes over a period of five
years before succeeding in his vacuum cleaner. How he employed a trial and
error approach and looked at other things for ideas. He highlighted that
designers need to “steal” from other products/designs as the famous saying by
Picasso goes, “good artists copy, great artists steal”. In other words,
designers look for inspiration from other works or at least improve them to be
better products.
Because designers don’t have the luxury of time in reality,
they need to fail fast and cheap rather than take a big hit in the market. Designers
should make failure part of the design process, and be willing to make as many
prototypes/failures as possible, learn from them, and solve them. He mentioned
how failure is regarded as bad in Asian culture, and “don’t tell the client”
syndrome is prevalent. However at CRE8, failure is part of their company
culture, and they make reports for prototypes, identifying mistakes, and
propose improvements, to present to clients. This tends to create some kind of
customer loyalty, and build the reputation of the company. Another value CRE8
has, is that they stay with their clients until manufacturing as a lot of
problems arise at this stage.
沒有留言:
張貼留言