Breaking In

Check out some great work from Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger.

AH: What sparked your interest in design?

MU: In my early teen years, I was fascinated by weapons: especially how different approaches can be taken by competing countries in shaping the hardware: battleships, fighter planes, tanks, etc. There, I learned about the interesting relationship between function and form as well as various production techniques and forms. More importantly, I learned that seemingly rational weapon design is heavily influenced by different cultures and design philosophies.

SM: Growing up I was surrounded by lots of old—or pretending to be old—things in our home. My parents didn’t like anything that wasn’t at least 80 years old, or looked the part. To me that didn’t make sense. I wanted to live with objects of my time and I wanted to make things and make them better. I became quite interested in contemporary furniture, appliances, and cars. I didn’t even know about industrial design, and when I found out about it, I knew this was what I wanted to do.

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Antenna was founded in 1997 by Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger. Antenna’s design projects range from public and commercial to experimental and artistic, typically spanning object, interface and environment. Among Antenna’s best known projects are the design of New York City subway cars and ticket vending machines, Bloomberg displays and interactive environments, such as Power Flower, an installation in the windows of Bloomingdale’s activated by passersby.In 2010 Knoll Inc. launched Antenna’s eponymous office furniture system designed for emerging work styles.

Antenna’s work has won numerous awards, including recognition from Business Week/IDSA, I.D., Fast Company and Wired magazines. In 2006, Masamichi and Sigi received the United States Artists Target Fellowship in the Architecture and Design Category. In 2008, Antenna won the National Design Award in Product Design. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Todd Herlitz.

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

TH: Before digging into a portfolio, I always give it a quick flip-through to get an overall sense of the designer’s work. The things that usually grab me initially are exceptional sketching skills and a good feel for refined form development. These two things tend to jump out immediately because they are relatively rare.

Sketching is always a key indicator. I think of it as a language that we speak and the more competent you are at it, the greater your ability to communicate with others around you. If you struggle with visual communication, it can impede your ideation and adversely affect the thought process. Fluency is ideal.

Beyond the sketching skills, there has to be evidence of great creative thinking and problem-solving skills. This is the most important thing that we do from day-to-day in product development. While I love a beautiful sketch or rendering as much as anyone else, without some deeper thinking informing them, they are illustrations, not concepts.

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Radio Flyer : Flyer 500

Todd Herlitz is a product designer with seventeen years of experience in the industry.  As the Design Director for Radio Flyer, his work with the brand includes leading the creative development of new product concepts and developing a visual brand language for their broad range of products.

Prior to joining Radio Flyer in 2009, he worked for several years as an independent design consultant in the toy, consumer product, and entertainment industries.  In this role, he worked with companies as diverse as Fisher-Price, Motorola, and Proctor & Gamble, even developing characters for Chuggington, an animated children’s television series.

Early in his career, Todd gained consulting experience working for design firms such as Altitude and Insight Product Development.  He also spent two years designing preschool toys in the Playskool division of Hasbro. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Michiel Knoppert.

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

MK: Beyond an excellent skill set of sketching, 3D CAD and such, we look for widely and broadly educated system thinkers with an analytic mind. They need to be good observers of life, and have an opinion and voice of their own, original and conceptual.

AH: What specifically in a portfolio showcases to you that an individual has these aforementioned skills?

MK: I don’t just want the pretty pictures, I want them to tell a story. I want to see someone truly understand a problem, form an inspired vision and—based on insights—create a unique and relevant solution to that problem. That solution should be in the form of a stunning design that shows that same vision, translated into form, function, materials, and color.

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Motorola Cliq

A while back, people started calling Michiel Knoppert an  “Experience Designer”, “Design Strategist” and—his  personal favorite— “Unicorn”, so when he looked over his shoulder to see where he strayed from being a  “Product Designer”, he realized he’d been on an unintentional, yet inevitable journey. Adding new skills to his design toolkit helped him understand and create desirable solutions for increasingly connected and complex problems. Maybe a simple title of “Designer” to describe Michiel suffices, for now.

Michiel graduated cum laude as an industrial design engineer at the height of the dot-com bubble and got to experience the last bit of that ride. His first 7 years as a professional were spent at Springtime in Amsterdam and New York, where he worked on projects for renowned international brands such as Nike, Coca-Cola and Toyota. There he designed anything from new skateboard concepts to sex-toys, futuristic soccer robots , fuel-cell carts and strollers. His work has been published in design magazines, won prizes and got exhibited, yet almost none of it was actually produced. His next job would lead him to launching actual products to market. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Tjeerd Veenhoven.

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

TV: Designers should try to develop their unique selling points, especially now in times of financial crisis. You are still a little bit of a luxury item to many companies. Design is still a very small element of the product design process in general. Of course, designers would like to change this but sometimes it’s too difficult and too expensive to do so. What I’m doing right now with our studio is making sure that throughout different projects we clearly state what our benefit is.

Our studio is so eclectic in the things we do that it’s sometimes very difficult for companies to assess how we would be of any value to them. We try to work towards establishing proper descriptions on our web page. In the last few months, as we have been working with a lot of bigger companies, we noticed that for them design is just not as easy to understand as we may think.

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Tjeerd Veenhoven is a product designer with a love for inventing materials and production techniques. In his mind being a designer is much more than just esthetics or expressing trends. From his design studio in the North of Holland he experiments with materials and crafts from all over the world developing new products to strengthen local economies, ecological awareness and design thinking.

Tjeerd Veenhoven is 36 and is founder of Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven. Besides that he is part of several innovation platforms. Through workshops and teaching he spreads awareness on bio based materials and the power of design thinking. The Palmleather project is an award winning and exemplary of how design can promote eco friendly materials and social responsibility.  In 2012 he cofounded HuisVeendam, an innovation platform and design label to promote starch technology and design thinking in product development, from raw material to end product and beyond.

Follow Tjeerd @TjeerdVeenhoven

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Check out some great work from Nasahn Sheppard.

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

NS: The portfolios that really catch my attention are the ones that tell really interesting and compelling stories. I’m looking for portfolios from people who can demonstrate in a succinct manner that they understand and can frame the challenge, how they approached and solved that challenge, and what their solution was. Design is so often about good storytelling. I think that young designers forget this.

AH: Has there been a portfolio that you’ve seen recently that resonated with you? What about it stood out?

NS: There was a portfolio I saw not too long ago. What they did really well was that, in a couple of pages, they explained who they were, what their philosophy was, where they had come from, and their journey to become a designer. It gave a little bit of a context and it made me feel like I understood this person even though I had never met them. When they showed a project, it was very clear what the challenge was they were trying to solve for, from the problem statement to some of the key steps they took to answer that particular problem.

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Flip Camera. IDSA Design of the Decade Winner.

Nasahn Sheppard is a strategic minded problem solver who is driven by a passion for finding simple solutions to complex challenges and empowering people through design. He is passionate about creating excellence. It’s his belief that everything made can be made better and that only by first asking why, we can challenge mediocrity and achieve greatness.

Nasahn holds multiple design and mechanical patents and has won many design awards, including a Design of the Decade and IDEA Gold for work with Flip Video. His thoughts on design and innovation have been published in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Sydney Morning Herald, Discovery Channel, and The Wall Street Journal, and he speaks regularly throughout the design community. Nasahn received a BS with Honors in Product Design from Art Center College of Design. He is currently the Divisional Vice President of Product Design for REI.

Follow Nasahn @NasahnSheppard

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