Tag: Professional

  • Innovation is Fracturing

    The pursuit of cheaper, faster manufacturing has lead to an enormous shift in the economies of the ‘old’ Industrial nations. After losing basic manufacturing and support roles, the West is now haemorrhaging advanced development and design functions to the manufacturing companies of Asia; in many cases run by Taiwanese business owners. Most of the major technology brands now have significant development operations in the region, and their role will only develop further.

    So, is Western design and innovation dead in the water?

    Cultural Exports

    The West (and Japan) have proven adept at innovating ‘platforms’. Technical platforms include HTML, GSM phone standards and television. ‘Cultural platforms’ are just as important, though; hip-hop, fixed-gear bikes, haute-couture fashion and social networking all started life in the West, and went on to stimulate globally influential industries around them; as evidenced on the streets of Taipei today.

    Fixie
    Fixed gear bikes – the idea imported from Europe. The bike made in Taiwan.

    Given the amount of technical expertise and knowledge on the ground in Taiwan, you would expect a similar amount of ‘platform’ innovation to be flourishing.  For one reason or another, it isn’t. This innovation requires an empowered workforce, willingness to start small (rather than ramping-up to volume production), great marketing teams, access to sales channels, and amongst a multitude of other economic and cultural factors, the willingness to play – you ain’t going to invent the first MP3 player without first loving music, and you aren’t going to assemble the first mountain bike without ‘wasting’ a whole bunch of time with your friends in the hills.

    But there is innovation here; just not in the ways we think about it. For example, the iPhone ‘platform’, while masterminded in California, was enabled by a dozens of Taiwanese technology vendors over many decades, and the gradual honing, optimisation and refinement of the component parts and assemblies was essential in its birth and development. It is this ‘incremental innovation’ competency that companies in the West are exporting to Asia.

    Now, ‘Platform innovation’ and ‘incremental innovation’ are geographically decoupling, eliminating  the ‘water-cooler’ conversations between marketeers, designers and engineers that so often lead to leaps of development.

    Learning how to work with these guys in China will be increasingly important.

    The Last of the Machinists

    Consider the ‘old guard’ design houses in America and Europe; IDEO, Frog, Seymour Powell and the rest. The senior leadership of these organisations likely gained tacit hardware knowledge in an economic environment built on manufacturing and engineering expertise; it’s even possible that their own parents worked in technical or factory roles. But what happens to innovative industries when the keepers of this tacit knowledge retire? For economies that pride themselves on ‘innovation’ and design services – the UK and USA included – I believe the consequences are severe.

    It’s part of the reason why, seven years ago, I decided to move to Taiwan.

    Dual-Stream Innovation

    Decoupling of ‘platform’ and ‘incremental’ innovation, difficulty in stimulating the ‘water-cooler effect’, and erosion of tacit knowledge, means many innovation-focused companies will struggle to do business in the way they used to.

    Apple and a few others have been able to leverage a split innovation model; offloading the burden of innovating the countless component parts that individually might not contribute much to a product, but together form a synergetic whole; and retaining core competencies of layout, computer processors and mechanical aspects such as part tooling. By doing this, they are able to ride the wave of ‘incremental innovation’ provided by the immense volumes of an entire industry, push suppliers in a very targeted way, and make the platform leaps when they are ready. The result; a product like the iPad delievered to a pretty low cost for the consumer; and still a healthy margin.

    Tooling in China
    Tooling in China. Supplier in Taiwan. Computer company in the USA. And a customer somewhere else entirely. Complicated!

    But what about companies smaller than the Fortune 500 behemoths? For the UK at least, we need to become far more willing to invest time and effort in Asia, forge partnerships, work out what incremental improvements we can outsource, and what platforms to retain.  The resultant development model is not the same as the one we learnt in university, and it is not the same as innovation process touted by the big innovation companies in the 90s.  It’s a messier, more complex, interlinked model, spanning companies and international boundaries.

    Western design and innovation is not dead, but it will need to become braver, more flexible and more cosmopolitan.

  • Finding an Industrial Design Job in Asia

    Finding an Industrial Design Job in Asia

    Leaving design school, it can be really tough to pick a career direction; let alone find a job.  Believing ‘change brings opportunity’, after graduating in 2003 I decided to head east and cut my teeth in Asia.  Now all I needed was a job, and a destination.

    Since I had never been to Asia before (it seems ridiculous to write that now), I lacked any connections or experience in the region.  What I did have was a resume that I had been building since leaving high-school that packed a solid range of work experience and internships in some well-known companies.  Crucially, a design education that included engineering and management training gave me the advantage of providing something a little different.  All this provided a good foundation to start the search.

    Leaving Europe.  The night before, I had a pain in my stomach unlike anything I had ever felt before … but since the cost of changing my ticket to come home was only €25, I tricked myself into leaving anyway; and almost seven years later, here I am.

    Working remotely, it was difficult to get a grasp of the ‘landscape’ of the design industry.  I naturally applied through the variety of HR web portals that larger companies maintain, but was not surprised when I did not hear anything back.  I browsed design company web sites, pestered my lecturers for alumni contact information, targeted conferences and design festivals looking for speakers and sponsors, and even pored through design award books looking for names.  Anything that could give me the crucial ‘@’, that allowed me to crack the e-mail code was considered.

    After months of freelancing, interviewing in the UK, and more than a little frustration, I finally hit pay-dirt when an innocuous ad for Asus Computers’ design team in Taipei popped up on Coroflot.com.  Phone interviews were followed by a face-to-face in Germany, and before I knew it, I had an offer.  I finally hit the ground on May 14th 2004; a solid ten months after graduating.  Do not underestimate the power of resourcefulness, patience and perseverance (and even a little cunning).

    My first few weeks on the ground were at first a little perplexing.

    I struck it lucky with that advert, but a cross-section of my international friends in the region reveals a similar picture; get stuck in with research, and don’t give up.  Nothing beats getting your feet on the ground out here, so book that plane ticket (ask your school to see if there are travel or research bursaries).  No-one is going to begrudge a meeting with you if you have flown half-way round the world, and it’s likely that if you do meet with other designers out here, your spirit of adventure will likely mean they are more open to help you.  You’ll be surprised.

    18 months on Asus’ design team was followed by almost three years in design studio, DEM.  And this bring me today, working for Dell on the notebook design team, deeply ingrained in the Taiwanese ‘industrial organism’, and a full paid-up member of the Asian Industrial Design Community.  More about that next time.

    Taking trains to visit vendors in China.

  • Things I Learned After Graduating Design School

    Things I Learned After Graduating Design School

    “Well, they didn’t teach us this in design school”

    These exchanges seem to happen with some regularity in the Dell design team.  So it got us thinking, what didn’t they – or couldn’t they – teach us in design school?  What do we wish we knew then, that we think we know now?

    Somewhat inspired by the list penned by Architect Michael McDonough, this is what the team came up with.  What else would you add?

    1. It’s not about design.

    Working away in the school studio, you’ll have more time and ability to focus on a single task than at any time in your professional design career.  Savour this luxury.  Instead, you’ll be facing a constant barrage of vague briefs, irrational clients, opaque politics, moving goalposts and suppliers that suddenly can’t deliver.  It will be the ability to hop, skip and jump between these obstacles that will keep you sane, and help you thrive.

    You’ll discover that the world does not revolve around your final sketch.  Compared to the amount invested in your beautiful little scribble, actually getting it to market will take technical, marketing and logistical resources many orders of magnitude greater.  You’ll discover you have to develop the ability to speak the tongues of business, of engineers and of countless other functions if you want to keep the little germ of your idea alive.  And you will, but before that …

    Borrowed from Flickr user 2plus2isfive

    Glasgow School of Art in Scotland where I studied Product Design Engineering … photo borrowed from Flickr user 2plus2is5

    2. Your ideas will die, often horribly.

    The pain of seeing something beautiful rejected by a client is beaten only by seeing it mutate into a hideous zombie, out of your control, and yet entirely your responsibility.  You’ll physically revolt as you complete the umpteenth round of revisions, at the behest of someone wearing far worse shoes than you.  You’ll mutter under your breath, willing it to die, and loaf around like a teenager, high on hormones that have lain dormant since puberty.  If it makes it to market (as these zombie projects inevitably do), the shock of seeing it in the flesh will make you wonder whether you are really cut out for design.  Take consolation in the fact that complete annihilation of an idea means potential resurrection.

    The hit-rate of products making it all the way will be considerably lower than your expectations.  Working in a consultancy, you might see 5% of your projects making it past the finish line.  If you are lucky or working somewhere with comically low levels of risk, you might be seeing 50% of your work prevail.  Just be ready for constant and repeated failure; but it’s from failure that victory takes flight.

    Thomas Fishburn - Marketoonist

    Marketoonist Tom Fishburne nails it in his pithy cartoons.

    3.  You are not as good as you want to be.

    Not in a bad way, it just means you have not yet fulfilled your potential.

    As Ira Glass points out in these magnificent videos, the reason you got into design (or any creative profession) is because you have taste.  You’ll float through school, get that first job and have this faint, nagging sensation that what you are working on is not all that good.  This will continue for years, until that impeccable taste you have been nurturing is finally matched by your blossoming abilities.  I began to feel confident after four or five years, and this perhaps matches Malcom Gladwell’s theories that it takes about 10,000 hours of work to really get good at something – but it’s no race, and some days it feels like I have regressed back to the start.

    So be aware that you suck a little bit, use it as fuel to improve, but don’t let it get you down.  In fact…

    4. Be patient.

    Getting your first full-time design job can be a total pain. I graduated, went traveling for a couple of months, came back and started looking for employment.  Amid phases of freelancing, job searches, twiddling my thumbs and interviewing, I ate up about ten months until I started on my first day at grown-up work.  But once you are in, you are in, and you will be surprised how quickly you develop networks and relationships to take you to the next level.

    Waiting to get something you are proud of in your folio may also take an age.  See #2.  Some of the work you are doing will be helping to set a direction, which will then turn into real projects with lead-times about the same length as your entire professional career; cell phones and other electronic equipment typically take 9 months to a year to flow from ID model to the shopfront.  Factor in aforementioned failures, and you could easily be waiting several years before you get your first product on sale.

    So, slow down.  Be realistic.  And be thankful you don’t work in the pharmaceutical industry where development times can be measured in decades.  Unless you are working in the pharmaceutical industry, that is.

    Keep Designing

    Never stop pushing.  Write, take photos, sketch, make models; pick your poison and hone your skills.  At the same time, don’t be afraid to chase people, hunt for e-mail addresses and generally ignore signs to give up.  Nothing worth fighting for ever came easily.

    5. You will hate it.

    Perhaps because you do something that you love, when things go wrong (and they will) you will hate it.  Not just ‘I hate Tuesdays’, or ‘my boss is annoying’.  No, this is unfocused rage, ignited by feelings of injustice at a project being canceled, or disconsolation when your software skills mean the 3D model breaks down at midnight before the presentation.  You’ll probably become more philosophical with age, and pass the baton of frustration onto some other unsuspecting junior, but don’t completely lose the ability to hate things.  It means you care, and this energy will be what spurs you on to greater heights of quality and delivery.

    But sorry, if you want a nice, stable job without any troughs, get a job in a bank.  Just don’t expect as many peaks either.

    6. Making things that look easy is difficult.

    It’s easy to look at the single-piece rubber base of a Macbook, the striking interface simplicity of a Flip, or the bold silhouette of Dr. Dre’s headphones and think ‘I could do that’.  Masked behind this apparent simplicity are technical challenges, organisational ‘feature creep’ inertia and battles over risk and cost.  90% of good quality is design is in the execution, but sadly this will be out of your control unless you start doing more legwork.  From the moment your idea hits paper, it will try its damnedest to become as ugly as possible by the time it first greets customers;  you’ll discover that some obscure country requires its regulatory logo to be as large as a postage stamp, that in order to meet recycling criteria it will need to be assembled with large screws, and that the white plastic you wanted to use has been bought-up by Nintendo for the Christmas Wii rush.  Facing these these problems, all you can do is draw on your creativity, manage the damage, and learn for the next time.

    Injection Moulding Machine

    Like it or not, the ultimate quality of your product will be decided by factors potentially out of your control, often in another part of the world.  Get good at speaking in the language of Engineers, suppliers and the people paid to execute your product.  Even better, relish the opportunities to dive into technical problems.

    7. Things change.

    When I started university, Minidisc was the ‘in’ music format.  When I graduated, we spent the last few weeks together frantically filling Zip drives (ask your Dad about them) with MP3s and staring at the rows of CDs we had all splurged our student loans on.  The point is, things change quickly, and the world will be a different place when you graduate.  Luckily for you, you are a designer and you will adapt, all while scaring yourself silly.

    This also means that the things your lecturers are teaching you in first year become irrelevant by the time you leave.  So, focus on learning how to learn, and don’t get too wrapped-up in software and the latest widgets – you can learn that from a book or on the job.

    disks

    Zip disks once held unimaginable amounts of data, and using one at art school seemed awfully professional.  Less so now. Photo from Flickr, by Runs with Scissors.

    8. Your friends will earn more than you.

    But you’re not in this for the money, right?  Whatever, it will still irk you that while you are beavering away at trying to score a non-paying internship, your friends will be recruited by management consultancies, lured by the bright lights and Audi A4s of accounting, and generally earning a hell of a lot more than you.  While this is not likely to change, what I hope you discover after a few years (see #4), is that you are developing a true career for something you love (see #5).  And that is worth more than money.

    9. The bum job is never the bum job.

    It’s all too tempting to huff and puff at the jobs you deem dull and boring.  You want to design the TVs, when all I get to design is the stupid power supply.  Poor you!

    But here’s the thing; do the so-called bum jobs and you will gain respect amongst your peers, carve new relationships for the role of design, and discover that it’s often these parts that turn up in multiple other areas of the company.  Suddenly, the power supply that you originally made for a TV also pops up in other products, and you have planted the seed.  So, get in the habit of jumping in with both feet, and people are very likely to take notice.

    I have control!

    A friend of mine working at a big European electronics company once took on the challenge of redesigning all their remote controls.  What started out in music equipment and televisions, eventually ended up with him building relationships in Medical Devices, and throughout the organisation. Enthusiasm is infectious.  Photo by Crouching Badger.

    10. There is no one career path.

    Looking at the designers that comprise the Dell design team, you see a surprising span of disciplines and cultures.  While there are those where the design job followed a path set by the design school, there are just as many with backgrounds in architecture, engineering and medical products; there is no one route.  What we share, regardless of background, is a set of attitudes, aptitudes and experiences that enable us to deliver world-class products and experiences.  As a designer emerging from school, it’s your job to build these blocks and learn how to combine them.

    Good luck!

    Jonathan Biddle is Lead Industrial Designer at Dell, based in Taipei, Taiwan.

  • HiRecruit 2010

    HiRecruit 2010

    The Taiwanese government’s HiRecruit campaign aims to attract professional talent to the island.  This year, they asked me to talk about what brought me here, and why other people should do the same thing.  Check out the video below:

    Obviously what I really cared about was that I looked good on the bike … 🙂

  • I strive to create great things, resulting in satisfied people

    “I strive to create great things, resulting in satisfied people”

    It took me several hours, multiple attempts, over many months to write that simple sentence, but I think it sums me up.  I am, by training, an Industrial Designer and Mechanical Engineer.  However I seem to gain a similar amount of pleasure from cooking food, taking photos, delivering a speech or writing my blog.   I like to make satisfying things, I gain pleasure in understanding why and how to make things better, and I enjoy thinking about how to work with other people in the pursuit of doing these things.

    Why even bother taking the time to write down what it is that I do?  After quite a few years in the field, and with a bit of experience under my belt, I wanted to pause and reflect on where I have come from, where I am right now, and perhaps most importantly where I want to go.  To do that, I need a foundation, and a set of principles.

    So, please indulge me, as I dissect these words;  “I strive to create great things, resulting in satisfied people”

    First of all, I wanted a statement that avoided common jargon and advertising speak, and that summed up the message in a short, natural-sounding soundbite.  For a while I had “I strive to create great products, resulting in satisfied customers“, but my aspirations extend beyond work alone, and include more people than solely customers.  Yep, I aim to please, and enjoy delivering the goods for the team, the company … and I vainly hope do good in the world.

    I also realise I am not Buckminster Fuller; I don’t think I am trying to create a ‘dent in the universe’.  I am a ‘craftsman’ at heart, and I enjoy the sheer act (the verb) of designing things, as many designers do.  If I can make some things that I am proud of, and that other people admire, I will be happy.  Ego, fed.  Somewhat.

    But for me, design is as much a cerebral activity.  I strive, and this brings a desire to understand, to postulate, improve, optimise and to inspire change.  The act of writing about or verbalising the process, communicating the idea, or crafting the pitch is even more agonising than doing the design itself.  I might even find it easier to talk about others’ achievements, since there is a reduced bragging ‘overhead’.

    And ‘Resulting’?  Not sure.  I’ll leave that for the next version.  I did, however, consider why there was no full stop.

    Austin architecture … perhaps adding to my contemplative mood right now.

    That’s my kimono open with my tackle dangling in the breeze; so what do you do?

  • You’ll Find Innovative Technology in Taiwan!

    Things get exciting at about 1:35 in …

  • Two Years at Dell

    Two years at Dell tomorrow – Lordy how time flies. And a deserved change of seats to the coveted spot by the window!

  • DEM inc : The New Office

    I haven’t really said too much about the new office location. Over Chinese New Year we shifted from the sticks of Shilin to the bright lights of Keelung and Jhongxiao. Downtown baby!

    The investment in the new place is impressive, easily putting it on par with many European offices. The office is small (we seem to have instantly filled the place), but has impressive detailing and intelligent use of space. Energetic, and a professional step up in the world.

    The down side is certainly that I had to cancel Chinese study with Michael in Tienmu. We had a good six month run of continued study together with the school near my old work, and more or less on his way home. It was a very pleasant way to stay in touch. The shift to the new downtown school on An He Road (and now six hours a week, up from four) is good, but I do miss a language study partner.

    The shift in geographic focus is having some interesting side effects. I am cooking far less at home, now I am in such easy proximity of my friends, and all the bars. And in general I am spending less time at the apartment – not that I was ever at home much anyway. So, I need to be more careful about my sleep patterns, which remain pretty eratic.

    I’ll put a bunch more photos up when the professional shots come back from the developers, but for now here is a shot from the recent grey days of Taipei early spring… now replaced with glorious sunshine and outdoor beers!


    101 at lunch

  • DEM – The New Office

    Life is changing quickly for me. A new apartment and a new job are two significant differences in my life, that should both bring some good benefits. The new office certainly stimulating and I am really looking forward to my job developing over the coming weeks. For now, I should introduce to Prada – the office bitch.

    Prada assists

  • Asus – Game Over

    Last week, I submitted my notice to my boss Debbie and I will be leaving Asus, and one incredible year behind me.

    Various frustrations, plus the prospect of a new job made the decision logical, if not entirely easy. I will, of course, be leaving behind my dearest friends in Taiwan and a group that has warmly welcomed me to Taiwan. But the time is right to move on.

    I’ll be starting at DEM, working as an Industrial Designer under Michael Young. I’ll be working with Lorenzo again and I think I should be learning an enormous amount in the coming months. Check the links below for some more information:

    DEM
    Michael Young

    I’ll post some more information soon, but for now that is enough … I am also moving apartmant this week, so some real life upgrades here in Taiwan!

    My last ever Gon Bao Ji Ding (Kung Po Chicken)