Breaking In

Check out some great work from Stuart Karten.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

SK: The very first thing I look for is a state-of-the-art skill level in design—smart and creative use of color, proportion, form, etc. This is the minimum threshold that a candidate must meet. But beyond that, I’m interested in portfolios that demonstrate a breadth of capabilities, from research through concept development. The way a portfolio is formatted should present a narrative thread that lets me know where an idea originated, what research—what consumer or market need—supports the idea, and what thematic visual inspiration drove the design.

AH: What do you think of showing work that’s not industrial design in a portfolio? Things like art, photography, hobbies, etc.?

SK: I think this is a good idea. It helps me gauge a candidate’s passions and areas of interest that might inspire his or her designs. However, outside interests should only be a small percentage of a portfolio’s content.

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Starkey Zon Hearing Aid: Driven by in-depth customer research, Karten Design introduced functional innovation and a dynamic new design language to Starkey’s behind-the-ear hearing aid line. When Karten Design learned that 60- to 85-year-old users associate traditional hearing aids with age, disability and weakness, they set out to design hearing aids that empower their users. They developed a design language that borrows visual cues from modern architecture, jewelry and automotive design. With a palette of six understated colors that blend with hair and skin tones, the hearing aid becomes virtually invisible when worn behind the ear.

Stuart Karten is the president of the award-winning Los Angeles-based product design and innovation consultancy, Karten Design. Since 1984, he has partnered with medical device and consumer electronics companies to commercialize new technology, using design strategy and research, industrial design, user experience, and engineering to develop products that create positive experiences for people. Driven by strategic market understanding and deep user empathy, he helps companies seize new opportunities and create compelling products that resonate with end users, increasing adoption and enabling better outcomes. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Lambert Kamps.

AH: Your work blurs the line between art and design. Can you discuss your approach and share an example of the challenges that you face in designing for a very niche market?

LK: The first five years of my own practice, I concentrated on art projects. I made a lot of big objects for exhibitions in galleries, in festivals and moved during that period a bit in the direction of autonomous architecture. After those five years, some interior projects came along and I started to use art concepts in interiors and vice versa. It wasn’t a choice, it just happened. I think that it is interesting to make an artistic, political, or critical statement in design. There are enough products, empty products, which are only made because of the shape, color, or technique. I need a reason to design; just making a product is not interesting enough for me. It is not so easy to earn money with this approach, so I didn’t become a rich man, but people are interested and I can tell them something through my designs.

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Animation Billboard Assen: The quayside in the city of Assen (NL) is enriched with a billboard that Kamps has designed. This billboard shows in an animation the residents of Assen what the near future will be of this outdated industrial area next to the city center. The unveiling of the object was also the start of the work which will transform the area the coming ten years into a modern urban living area. The billboard is moveable and will always accompany the work.

Lambert Kamps is an artist and designer based in Groningen, The Netherlands. Lambert studied fashion and design before attending Academie Minerva School of Fine Arts in Groningen. His work is widely exhibited in galleries, art fairs and on site-specific installations or happenings, known for blurring boundaries between art, architecture and design. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Ravi Sawhney.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

RS: The portfolio needs to be presented in kind of a magazine format, very well composed, a very quick read, with some deep dives into seeing how insights tickled your curiosity to know more about the person behind it. It’s really a promotional piece, almost as if you’re selling a service. The quality of the presentation we see are these beautifully balanced, well-constructed, well-designed books and the presentation alone says something about their ability to work within a professional design environment. It’s really that quality of presentation combined with a depth that brings them in for an interview. So they need to have a quality of presentation to see the sense of freshness, a sense of understanding all of the dynamics of designing today. It’s not just pretty pictures without substance. You have to have some substance to want to talk to this person and understand their process and how they got there.

Doing a portfolio today…it’s got to be a semester project. Just to build a high-quality portfolio that’s going to open the right doors—it’s got to be a semester project.

So then what do we expect from a designer during the interview? What we expect to learn from the designer is the understanding of this person’s ability to insight and strategize how they design. What they feed their heads with to create the design, the actual design exploration, the testing of the design, the ergonomics, touching all the bases. How it will be marketed, what the value is. You look to see any group projects and this leads into conversations. The conversations tell us about the work. How people answer, how they think, and how they communicate tells us about the caliber of the person and tells us about their ability to fit into an organization.

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Hamilton Ventilator: A portfolio of three products was created to satisfy intra hospital (C1), emergency transport (T1) and MRI usage (M1) in which these highly portable respiratory ventilators provide vital, life-saving support in a rugged, ergonomically refined, intuitive, and affordable package in order to better serve both caregivers and patients.

Ravi Sawhney, a Canadian born designer of Indian descent, was raised in Los Angeles, California where he attended CSU Northridge and Art Center College of Design. Today he leads RKS in Southern California, a firm he started in 1980 after leaving Xerox where he was the lead designer on the first generation of touch screen interfaces. He remarkably alternates between roles as CEO, entrepreneur, lecturer, author, designer and, most importantly, as an advocate of design’s ability to help others and make the world a better place.

As the founder and CEO of RKS Design, Ravi Sawhney has spent more than thirty-five years at the forefront of product and technology innovation and has grown his industrial design consultancy into a global leader in the fields of strategy, innovation and design. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Paul Bradley.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

PB: It used to be that portfolios themselves were kind of design projects and students would hand-build some type of a portfolio. It was very typical in the past that you would get a portfolio class towards your last semester of school and you would learn how to create a portfolio. Now, there’s a lot of similarity in how most of the portfolios look and feel because they’re on a digital page and share a lot of formatting and almost standardized appearances, particularly the ones that come through websites like Coroflot.

You’re often looking for an exception, someone who’s thinking a bit differently than everybody else. We used to call that “the green haired people.” I think the term is still appropriate. It came from the new age or punk scene where people ran around with colorful hair. They were a little bit off-center and interesting.

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Nautilus Mobia: With its clean and simple design and slim silhouette, Mobia’s functional minimalism entices users to keep the fitness machine displayed in a prominent place—and to use it more often.

As Executive Creative Director of Industrial Design for frog, Paul Bradley drives the strategic impact of the company’s global product development practice, working closely with the creative leadership team to foster frog’s expertise in product design. He collaborates closely with frog’s strategy and software groups to develop creative solutions for clients in each of frog’s nine international locations across the US, Europe, and Asia.

Prior to joining frog, Paul spent 16 years with IDEO and was instrumental in building its reputation as one of the world’s leading industrial design firms. He has won numerous design awards from both IDSA and I.D. magazine, and is recognized for his pioneering work on the first mouse for Microsoft. Bradley’s work on Logitech’s 3D mouse is featured in the Museum of Modern Art Permanent Collection. Working across a broad range of industries he has accumulated more then a dozen patents. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Rajat Shail.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

RS: Typically, there are two ways to look at a candidate: you look at a résumé or you look at their portfolio. I think a level of creativity is also how people present themselves, how they pitch themselves. I think that’s very valuable because the essence of industrial design is to try and stand out from the other products. It’s your ability to enable the customer to understand the value of your product, the face value as well as the assumed value. The same philosophy needs to be used by candidates to get the attention of prospective employers. It works well, this notion of approaching a job as a design problem, the way they present their portfolios.

A good portfolio is one which is empathetic to the user, the user in this case being the prospective employer. A good designer knows their audience and has a sense of how much information needs to be projected, using the right amount of detail to get attention. Once you have the hook, you can lead the audience through your project. It’s almost whimsical and audacious at the same time. Design is the hook to provoke me to ask, “How did you come up with that amazing solution?”

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Honeywell Lyric

The world of Design first revealed itself to Rajat Shail while he was studying architecture. Imagining and creating buildings—which not only met the functional requirements of its residents, but elevated the quality of their lives through meaningful interactions—facilitated an engaging space creation for objects.

Shail transitioned into Industrial Design as the tangibles fascinated him.  In the world overpopulated with consumer products, he was intrigued by the possibility to reduce visual dissonance and bring creative functionality with delightful meaningful objects. He has worked with companies like Yamaha, Motorola, Mattel, Steelcase, Whirlpool and Honeywell, and consulted for many others.  Through such experience, Shail noticed there was a need for value creation through technology, and for products with everyday solutions without compromising beauty.  The strength of an idea in his eyes is ultimately in how essentially and seamlessly it inserts itself into people’s everyday lives, and how the absence of said seamless idea becomes physically and emotionally burdensome.

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