REDACTED Industrial Design Podcast Interview
I've gathered a few stories in my decade+ of working in industrial design in Silicon Valley.
I was recently invited to share some of those stories and reflect on how I got to where I am today on the REDACTED industrial design podcast. I had a wonderful time chatting with hosts Fraser Greenfield, Lucy Bishop, and Louis Mills.
Listen in to hear more about:
The geeky hobbies that led me to industrial design
Working at NASA and stealing some government property
Getting into the world of design consulting
How luck and networking plays into the job seeking process
Going from intern to partner at Bould Design
Things I look for in a good design portfolio
The biggest challenges throughout my career
What (I think) my "superpower" is
Should digital design be valued more than industrial design?
How to improve the perceived value of ID
My work with the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) diversity, equity, and inclusion council
The design culture of Silicon Valley
My best advice to young designers
Be sure to check out their other episodes to hear some insights from other great industrial designers.
For those who prefer to read, below is a transcript with some light editing for clarity and brevity.
If you listen (or read), let me know what your thoughts were and if you have any questions!
This will be my last post for 2022, so I hope everyone is having a nice, restful holiday.
See you all in 2023.
P.S. A few weeks ago I launched a project prompt generator to inspire personal projects for industrial designers called Things to Design.
While I found many graphic/UI/UX prompt generators, I didn't find a single one for ID. So I made one.
Check it out and let me know if you have suggestions for more prompts, or how the site works!
Louis: Today, we're joined by Anson Cheung. You might know him as a former partner at Bould Design. He's also done a fair bit of work with the Industrial Designer Society of America, and specifically with the Diversity and Equity and Inclusion Council.
Welcome on the show. Would you like to describe yourself?
I'm an industrial designer with over a decade of experience working on technology products in Silicon Valley. I was formerly a partner at a design studio called Bould Design, which was responsible for some iconic products such as the Nest Thermostat, GoPro cameras, Roku streaming players and audio products, and many more.
In the past decade, I've personally worked on things as diverse as cameras, robotics, food technology, sleep technology, smart window coverings and even an electric scooter thrown in there. Outside of design, I also love making furniture. I love cooking and I like coffee.
Lucy: I love it when people always introduce themselves with things outside of design as well. I feel like it's a fun little window.
It's not the only thing we're about right? We're people.
Lucy: Absolutely.
Louis: Yeah, definitely and coffee is definitely a thing that keeps us all going.
How did you discover the field of design?
When I was a kid, I really liked to draw and my dad encouraged me to explore that interest and he drew pictures with me. That obviously stayed with me throughout my life, but also I like to build these robot model kits called Gundams. That was a big part of my childhood. And now looking back at them, you really realize what a miracle of injection molding these things are. They come molded-
Lucy: With all the track lines?
Yeah, with all the track lines and everything. And you can see like how the co molding happens and they have six different colors on one screw and it was pretty amazing. But back then they were just cool models for me throughout my childhood and into my teenage years. I would make these model kits and I really just liked putting things together and assembling them.
And then that started to translate into an interest in a subject called design and technology in my secondary school. So I grew up in Hong Kong, which is a former British colony. I went to an international school and they followed the British curriculum there. So in the UK curriculum you have a subject called design and technology, which you had to take until grade nine, and then you could choose whether to continue it or not.
I had the subject in school and I liked doing these things at home, like putting model kits together, drawing and then eventually I found out through that subject that this was actually a real job that you could make a living doing this. And I was pretty good at other subjects too, but after I found that out, it was like, oh, well this is it. This is what I'm doing.
Lucy: Did your teacher pick up a natural skill that you had or were they like, "Oh, you're really interested in this model making have you thought about this?"
Or was it something that you researched on your own and came to the conclusion that this was what you wanted to do?
I didn't really tell people about the model making because I think back then it was seen as like this geeky thing that you didn't really talk to people about.
But I did well in the subject in school and my teachers really encouraged me. Actually. One of them was Australian, Mr. Clarke.
Louis: Ah, that's so cool. Shout out to Mr. Clarke.
They really encouraged me and they showed everyone that this could be a career and there were such things as professional industrial designers and all the products around us were designed by people, which seems so obvious, but I think most people don't really think about how the things around them came to be.
So yeah, I learned about it in school and they showed us documentaries and famous designers and yeah, I eventually settled on the idea of becoming a professional industrial designer someday.
Lucy: You sound like you have this incredible foundation of all this things that like these teachers had taught you that like I know I definitely didn't have anything like that.
I'm very grateful to the fact that I had that experience as a kid and was able to find this career path.
I know in the UK there's been some talk of getting rid of the subject as a required subject because people don't think it's important. Like people don't think it's valuable to learn how to make things out of wood and screw things together, or hot glue things together.
That's kind of sad.
Lucy: I totally agree. I think especially being able to repair things and modify things is such a useful skill for anyone throughout their life. It's really sad that they perceive design that way.
How did you make your first big break?
My first big career break was getting my internship at Bould Design, and that basically set me on the path that I'm on now and led to the last decade of my life. I can tell a little bit of a story of how that came about. If you want to hear more about it.
Lucy: I would love to hear about it. Absolutely.
I just graduated from RISD, which is the Rhode Island School of Design. I was doing an internship at NASA (the space people) in Texas, and in my final year of college, I had really set my eyes on working at a design consulting firm because a couple of people from Smart Design and IDEO came to speak at our school and they just seemed these really fun places to work. Really creative with all the brainstorming and the prototyping and doing all these cool different projects.
I knew that was where I wanted to go, one of these big design studios, so I was applying to a lot of jobs. I was in Texas at the time, and I didn't hear back from any of them. That was very disappointing.
But I think my portfolio just was not good enough to get an interview at any of these places. So I continued to work on my portfolio at night, on weekends and continued to apply. But then at one point, a friend of mine told me about a design studio in Mountain View, California that did the Nest Thermostat.
And this was right after the Nest thermostat had just come out. And it had made a big splash in the design world because it was like this unloved object that someone had put this totally new spin on. And it was beautiful, and it was way more usable than the crappy plastic things that most people had on their walls.
I was like, oh, I want to find out who did that. So I looked them up and it was a company called Bould Design, which I'd never heard. But when I looked on their website, they had all these big brands. They had Nest, they had Logitech, they had Roku, GoPro, and I thought they were like this big design studio and I was like, wow, I'll apply for an internship there.
And I sent an application and my friend knew one of the people at Bould Design and he put in a good word for me. And I got an interview for the internship, which was a three month internship starting in January of the next year. I got the interview and I got on a call and it was only two people. And I was like, wow, all this work comes from two people? That's pretty amazing.
We hit it off pretty well. I was super nervous, but I think they liked me. And a couple months later I was flying out to California to do this internship. And as they say, the rest is history.
Lucy: How did the two internships, NASA and at Bould Design compare to each other?
Oh, like extremely different.
NASA was very fun. It was very cool. I got to see so many things that I'll probably never see again in my lifetime, and most people may never see. I got to look at spaceships. I got to look at this giant swimming pool where astronauts did their neutral buoyancy training. I got to see one of the Saturn five rockets that took people to the moon and all that was amazing, but it was a little slow.
It was government work at government pace, it wasn't like exciting, crazy space design work. There was some of that. We did some cool projects, like me and my friend worked on this idea for a rehydration system for food, and we also helped the astronauts prepare for training in the Nevada desert that they do every year.
Yeah, it was pretty chill. Like we just hung out at the space center most days. We had some work to do and then we just walked around and saw cool stuff and just hung out.
Lucy: That sounds like such a pinch me moment. Like, we were just hanging at the Space Center.
I still have my badge that says NASA on it.
Louis: Oh, don't give that away.
I'm not exactly sure that I was supposed to take that with me so…
Louis: Oh, we might have to redact that
And then when I got to Bould design, it was like complete 180. It was so fast paced. I was learning so much. I was doing all kinds of different. In one day I could be working on three or four different projects. I was an intern, so I was doing very simple, lower level stuff. But it was still exciting because when you're the third person at a company, there's a lot you're doing that is more than maybe your pay grade allows for.
Lucy: I could imagine. Yeah. sounds like you really jumped in the deep end.
Yeah, it was drinking out of a fire hose.
Louis: That's a good way to put it. I think it's crazy as well to have gone through all the uni process and then getting internship at somewhere is like huge as NASA and then still having a hard time finding internships after that.
It must be quite a competitive place to get work over there. It sounds insane.
Yeah. I think it also depends on what field or what aspect of the field you're trying to go. NASA might be very prestigious in certain regards. If you were to join a very engineering focused company, they might have a lot of respect for that.
But if you are trying to join a design consulting studio, it's not as valued because. It's a cool name. It's a cool story, but like they don't really do design in the same sense that consulting firms do. It's not pretty. It's designed to work. It's definitely function over form and it is really a completely different ballgame and everything is only made once or twice. They don't mass produce anything.
Lucy: I was just about to say that it's all custom built.
Yeah. It’s like if you were a star basketball player and you tried to get a job at a design studio.
Louis: Yep. That's a good analogy.
It's just a completely different game.
Lucy: Sure, and if you were really inspired by people like IDEO and those incredible studios that have that real industrial design vibe to them, like if it's anything like Australia, there's actually not that many of those going around.
It's pretty easy to get sucked into that world. This is who I'm gonna be and this is what I'm gonna be doing. But a lot of entry level jobs in Australia, either like retail design or even like kitchen cabinetry is quite common to get into an internship where you are actually doing the prototyping and you've got room to explore and experiment is just so incredible.
Yeah, the market is certainly bigger in the US but even still design consulting is a small niche. It is probably one of the most visible niches in industrial design, but it's still pretty small, so it's quite competitive.
Louis: Yeah, it's good that you stuck to your guns and got into it, so that's awesome.
Yeah, I'm not gonna overplay my own skill. There's definitely a large element of luck to it.
If my friend hadn't sent me that link to the job posting, I never would've known about it, and I never would've applied. And if he had not put in a good word for me, I might not have gotten the interview. I might have, but I'll never know. There's always luck involved, and that's important for students and young professionals to keep in mind.
Anyone who I talk to who's sounding a little bit down about their job prospects, I always tell them a lot of it's luck. A lot of it's timing. Don't think that it's just you. There's nothing particularly wrong with anyone sometimes it is just timing and luck.
Lucy: And I think persistence as well, especially in my case. That was definitely a big one.
Persistence leads to luck because you just keep trying and you keep getting a chance. Totally. I think another thing, you never know who you're gonna meet. You said about your friend setting you up with this opportunity to get the interview, but he obviously wouldn't have vouched for you either unless you were a good friend. You're reliable, he thinks your work is good, like he's also putting himself on the line for you.
So it makes sense that you want to give as good a impression to everyone that you meet, and you never know who's gonna come and help you later. And you'll perceive it as luck when really you set yourself up for success.
Yeah, absolutely.
Louis: When you first graduated, what kind of challenges did you face when you were in this space looking for work, looking for internships?
The biggest challenge was not hearing back from people because you just don't know what you're doing wrong and not hearing back means that you don't have a chance to improve.
And I didn't hear back from anyone. Not a single job that I applied to responded to me except this one, which is fine because I'm on the path that I'm on now. But yeah, I had a less than stellar portfolio. I would say it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to get interviews at these bigger names. I think it was good enough to get an interview at Bould Design because they valued some of the process and thinking that I was showing a little bit more than some of the other firms.
But if I was to look back now, my portfolio definitely could have used some additional polish, and they don't really teach you how to do that in design school, at least when I was in school. They didn't really teach you how to get a real design job beyond just how to make a resume. And there were some portfolio reviews, there was some advice, but I don't think a lot of it was really that rooted in real world experience.
And I think at my school, there was almost a disdain for aesthetics. It was all about the idea, about the process, about the research. A lot of my work was frankly, quite ugly, and I see a lot of the same things happening in designers today and applications that I've received in the past. There's not as much of an emphasis on making something beautiful, which is a lot of the job in professional industrial design.
Of course, it has to be a good idea. It has to be something that's usable, but it also has to be something that's appealing to people and make them want to buy it, make them want to use it, and make them enjoy using it.
Lucy: And ideally buy again.
Yeah. They didn't really teach us that in design school, and that really hurt my prospects of getting into one of these design studios.
I think these days there are even more confusing challenges because a lot of design students also feel like they have to put in some UI UX. They have some like design research. They have all kinds of stuff mixed in there with the industrial design, and they don't really have really strong, solid industrial design.
And it can be very hard for an industrial design studio to then hire them. But industrial design studios are also getting so many applications that it's very hard to respond to people. So now that I've been on the other side, I can understand why I wasn't getting a response. But I think there's a disconnect there because there's no feedback loop.
So students are continuing to produce portfolios like I was, that were missing the mark, but they're not getting the feedback that helps them get closer. And so that's a little bit what I try to do on LinkedIn. I try to post tips on how to make your portfolio better, how to make it more appealing to specifically design studios.
And I also talk to a lot of students. A lot of young professionals and students reach out to me and I try to have calls with as many of them as I can. I go through their portfolios and I just give them very pointed feedback on how to make it more appealing to the kinds of places where they want to work.
Lucy: I really had the same issue when I was applying for jobs. You think the AB testing is oh, you send the folio off and you like either get an interview, you don't get the interview, you change something and then you do it again.
But when there's not that many jobs around, most of the time your applications aren't even being read. It's very difficult to do that AB testing. And I really thought towards the end, because I was pretty seriously looking for about two years. I was like, wow, maybe my work is just really bad. Like maybe that's the problem. And it turns out it was actually like the narrative that I was showing that was the issue.
I thought people would be really impressed by these finished models and like my, like making skills basically these hero images and it couldn't have been the opposite. Once I finally worked out the recipe, it all slotted into place and like on one hand it was amazing that I felt like I'd finally broken through.
There was also that part of me that was like, is this all I had to do two years ago? It would've been great to have known.
Louis: I think that's an issue with industrial design and the industry is there is not enough feedback. It's good when people have their own links that help them out with their portfolios and things like that, but I think if businesses took the time just to reply, give a little bit of feedback, it can only improve everyone who's applying if they know where they can improve. And I think it would definitely improve the industry as a whole.
Lucy: I know for me as well, it felt like people's folios were such like a tightly guarded secret. They had the secret layout that was gonna get them a interview and if I saw it, they wouldn't get it. So like I feel as if, if we were all sharing that it'd be good as well.
Everyone is interested in such different things. They've all got such different skills, but it doesn't need to be such a zero sum game.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Lucy: Even my closest friends wouldn't show me their folios and I was like, what is going on?
Yeah, maybe that's changing a bit because now everyone has their work on a website and it's mostly public facing. Maybe there's more learning from each other happening now.
Lucy: I really hope that's the case.
Louis: Yeah, that's the way it should be, I think.
Lucy: When you are looking at these applications at Bold Design, what do you think makes someone stand out as a good consultancy candidate?
I don't look at them anymore because I don't currently work there, but when I used to look at them, the most important thing to me was, number one, did they have work that could fit into our portfolio? Did they do work that looked like the work that we did at Bould Design? And that means it had to be of a certain aesthetic quality. It had to be presented in a way that was clean and crisp. At any company. I think that is the first barrier you have to clear. You have to show that your work is like the work that they do.
Look at their website and see does my work look like the work that is on their website? If you put it in a lineup, could it maybe fit in? And is it presented similarly? And for us, it had to be of a certain aesthetic quality. It had to be more on the minimal side. It had to be minimal, but not cold and sterile. It had to have a little bit of personality.
And that seems obvious to say, but sometimes people apply with work that looks nothing like the work that we did. And it seems a little bit odd that they thought that they would be able to get a job or an interview with us because it's clear that they value completely different things. So that's number one, is seeing work that looks like the work that we do and see it presented nicely.
Additionally, I would also look for a good thought process. So did they identify the problem clearly? Did they do appropriate research? What were the insights that they got from their research? How did that translate into the concepts that they developed? How did they test those concepts with prototyping? And then how did that inform their final design? How did they develop that final design? Is it prototyping combined with CAD, combined with rendering? Was there a little bit of back and forth? I think the important thing is to see some progression from point A to point B to point C.
I think a big mistake that a lot of students make is they check the box. They show I did some prototyping, I did some sketching, I did some research.
Lucy: One teacher once told me to draw 12 initial ideas. Here are the 12.
Yeah. So I would want to see which of these ideas were your best ideas. How did you test them?
What were the prototypes that you made to test them specifically and how did that inform your final design? So it's not just like a page of sketches, a page of prototypes, and then a page of final renderings. There's some clear progression, a very clear thought process, communicated well is something I would look for.
I already talked about prototyping a little bit, but prototyping is one of the things that I would always look for because if a candidate did not have any prototyping, that was automatically a red flag for us because we were a very hands-on studio and we made lots of prototypes. We tested things physically, and we couldn't really take candidates that didn't know how to do that or weren't naturally inclined to do that.
Some designers are really good at say the visual aesthetic side of things, and they're not so interested in the making side, and there is a place for designers like that, but it wasn't really suited to our studio because we needed people who could go through the whole process and we're naturally inclined to make prototypes, test things and validate them.
Lucy: I feel like also if you're building things, you get such an understanding of how components go together and all the theory behind that, different types of closures and mechanisms and the way things are actually secured. That just really helps inform the design work as well as the actual building lack.
Exactly, and one of the things that I would love to see in portfolios is people taking things apart and showing the internal components and showing that they understood what goes inside the kind of product that they're designing. And then show how they use that knowledge to put it back together into their design.
Louis: That would be very cool. Yeah. Yeah. You see a lot of portfolios that just really sketch and render heavy, but if you don't understand those components, it could come across as showing a lack of understanding for the product you're designing.
You've explained a little bits about your roles at Bould Design, but can you just go through what the path from intern to Partner was like and maybe how long that took?
I joined as an intern. I was an intern for three months, and then I. Started as a full-time designer and I was doing projects for almost five years.
And throughout that time I was evolving as a designer. Like early on I was very junior. I was learning, I was taking direction from obviously people that were more senior than me and learning a lot from my mentor Fred. And by the end of that time, say four or five years in, I was doing projects pretty independently and working with clients, mostly driving, we were still a small studio.
By that time I think we were still only five or six people, so there was still a lot of team involvement, but each person could own certain projects. So at that time, I was operating perhaps what you would call at like a senior or lead designer level. And then the founder of the studio, Fred Bould, he asked me to join as a partner along with another one of the designers, Jeremy Wolf.
And he knew that he needed help to grow the studio beyond what it was, and we were getting more and more work. So he brought the two of us on as business partners, and we grew the studio together over the next six years to what it is now, which I think at the highest point in the last year, we were at 18 people.
So it really grew a lot. It grew about 3X in the time that I was there when I was essentially working as a senior designer, joining as a partner, and then to when I recently left.
Lucy: It must have been such an interesting experience watching a company grow quite quickly as well.
Yeah, it was really interesting. Really fun. I had great partners. It's still an amazing studio. I'm really proud of what I built there with them, and it was such a rare, unique opportunity and it's a defining experience of my career. Like whatever I do after this, it's going to be because of the past 10 years that I spent at Bould Design.
Lucy: What would you say has been the biggest challenge over your career so far, and what was your secret weapon to get through it?
I think the challenges have been many and varied over the last 10 years. There are lots of different, biggest challenges over the different phases. I'll just list a few that I think are worth talking about.
Early on, just learning how to do industrial design was the biggest challenge. How to do industrial design professionally was a massive challenge because there's so much to learn. There's so many things that you don't get exposed to in school. You learn about them theoretically, but you don't actually make an injection molded part until you're working professionally.
So just learning the skills, the knowledge, some of the rules of thumb that professionals use, that was the biggest challenge early on. And then also learning a professional process, how to make sure you're doing things in an organized way, maintaining quality control, working with professional engineers and product managers.
That was a pretty big challenge as well because that's not really something that they teach you in school. It's all learned on the fly. Learning to work with clients, which can be a high stakes situation. You don't want to say the wrong thing, you don't want to mess up, you don't want to bomb a presentation.
Most of the time clients are just people, they're pretty chill. But there are some presentations where you could be presenting to a CEO or your work is being presented to a C E O. And if you made a mistake, it could be bad news for everyone involved. Those were all pretty big challenges in the early days, and then later on as my role changed in the company and I started to work on business things more, and also learned more about managing teams and working with larger groups of people that came with its own unique challenges, like developing leadership skills, which again, no one teaches you, and if you're working in a small company, there's no one to teach you that there either.
Lucy: Or if there is, it doesn't necessarily mean they're using best practices.
Yeah, and I think all of the partners at Bould Design were pretty open-minded about leadership, so that was great because we all made it a priority to develop that in ourselves and in each other. So we would read leadership books, read business books about how to be good managers and talk about it together and apply what we'd learned.
Learning how to be a good manager is definitely a massive challenge. And there's a lot of trial and error and probably if you talk to some people that worked with me early on, they would tell you there was a lot of error. But I learned through doing, and maybe if you talk to some people who have worked with me more recently, they might tell you that hopefully I was a good leader for them.
Also, learning the business side of things was, again, hugely challenging because when you're in design school, you're learning how to draw, you're learning how to CAD model, you're not necessarily learning how to read a balance sheet or make sure you have cash flow and that kind of stuff. So managing the business side of things was definitely a very fun and rewarding challenge.
And eventually, I would say also developing my own point of view on things. After you do all the learning, you have to synthesize it into something that you believe and you think about on a personal basis and be able to express that to other people. And that is still a big challenge for I think myself and a lot of designers that are just learning and growing every day.
Your other question was about what my superpower was to handle all of those challenges. And I think it's really something quite simple. It's having a growth mindset, which is the mindset that you can grow and change and acquire new skills in order to meet new challenges. And I think that is probably the most important quality any designer can have.
And even outside of design, it is one of the most important mindset shifts that you can cultivate within yourself because if you believe that you can learn and grow to meet new challenges, you can solve any problem. And I think that has allowed me to continue to learn about design, about business, about leadership, and tackle these really hard problems without getting discouraged and also being able to learn from my own mistakes.
That's the superpower, I think, and I would encourage any designer to think about how that applies to their own career.
That and a lot of Googling, honestly.
Louis: It's a great story. It's so cool to have gone from intern to partner in the same company. It seems like it's quite rare to have that. Usually they might hire somebody in or partner with somebody that's been in the industry for quite a lot longer. But I was just wondering why do you think it's so rare that this career trajectory happens, and do you think this trend should be reversed?
I think a lot of people who start design studios do it because they have a vision and they want to do things their own way, and that doesn't necessarily mix with bringing on partners because then you've got other people in the mix, other opinions, and it's not necessarily your show the whole time anymore.
I was very lucky in that I joined a studio that was founded by someone who was willing to share the responsibility with other people and was open-minded to growing the studio as a partnership with more cooks in the kitchen, you would say. And I'm very thankful for that because there are a lot of studios where it's one visionary or head at the top, and a lot of people that work for them.
I was in a pretty unique position in that I was able to lead and grow this studio as a partnership of three people. And I think it can be a pretty successful model because when you have partners, your incentives are aligned, and if you're actually partners in the studio, then all of the partners are incentivized to grow the business.
And then you have more minds focused on the growth of the business. And in that way, you can expand the pie for everyone. Even the designers that are not partners, they'll benefit from it because you've got more people at the leadership level thinking about leadership issues like management, like finance, like marketing, and then also thinking about getting new clients in and growing the business so that there's more work for everyone.
It's a very good model for a design firm as long as your partnership team is aligned on the vision and they're rowing in the same direction and not rowing in different directions and pulling the place apart. Yeah, I was very lucky and maybe more design firms should experiment with it. I do know of a few that are partnerships, but also if you want to keep it small and just make it your own, I think that's perfectly fine.
You just need to know what is your personal vision for the company. Do you want it to be a partnership that is bigger and has more opinions involved, or do you want it to be your personal studio? And both are fine. I think it's just being clear about what your vision is and communicating it to the people that work with you. That's the most important part.
Lucy: It sounds like it makes for a really great workplace culture where everybody is focusing on improving themselves and nobody is looking at it as a zero sum game where if you improve these skills that I don't have, you're suddenly going to be threatening me. It's like we all improve and we all rise together.
I think that's certainly the culture that we built at Bould Design, but I also think that is applicable to the design industry as a whole. I don't think it really is a zero sum game. Just because someone does something slightly better than you, doesn't mean that you can't also improve and get better at your skillset, and then maybe they got one client, but you can get a different client.
There is enough to go around for everyone, and the more good design there is out there, then the bigger the market for design will be. I think that this attitude of hiding your work and being very guarded about your practices is pretty counterproductive and not necessary.
Lucy: I completely agree.
You've spoken about how UX and UI designers usually have higher paying jobs than industrial design and the reasons for that, but does industrial design really warrant lower value, especially when considering hardware carries with it greater risks than software? Or do we have a problem communicating our value?
Does industrial design warrant a lower value? No, I don't think it does.
I think a lot of businesses don't particularly understand the value of industrial design, and I think industrial designers do have some things working against us that we need to be aware of. UX, UI designers, they have the benefit of working digitally and just by that nature, they're more tightly integrated with the business functions of their companies usually because they can iterate a lot faster, they can produce a lot more conveniently measurable metrics and they can very quickly demonstrate their value by showing, “Look at this design work that we did. It made these changes to the product and our revenue doubled. And here are the numbers.”
Industrial design doesn't have that same luxury. There's always production time, there's development time that is longer, and then you have to get the thing to market. So usually by the time the product is out, the design phase was long ago and it can be hard to map that impact onto the design work that was done, especially for business people who already don't quite understand what design is sometimes.
So I think industrial design is extremely valuable to a lot of companies. An easy example is Apple. They are almost entirely driven by industrial design. All of their marketing focuses on the products and even their software is sold through a hardware-first mentality. They are one of the rare companies that values industrial design as a top tier function.
It's easy to point to them as an example of industrial design’s value, but I think you can see examples all over the place. A lot of products that you see out there, just off the top of my head, let's say Away luggage. Their whole brand is based around these suitcase designs. How much is that worth to the company?
If they didn't have that design, would their product be selling as much? Would they be able to sell it at that price point if it wasn't so beautifully designed? These are the things that industrial designers need to point to and talk to and try to consistently make the case for industrial design as a valuable function of the company in driving sales and driving revenue and driving connection with the customer.
Industrial designers just traditionally haven't done that as much, and one of the things that I pointed to in my writing is that if you Google the business value of design, all of it is basically UX UI content. It's all written by UX UI designers talking about why design is important from a business standpoint, and almost none of it is industrial design, and part of that is just that there are less industrial designers out there, but part of that is just also industrial designers don't tend to do that kind of.
I couldn't really find as many resources when I was researching my article about why industrial design was important from a business standpoint, and mostly it was that one McKinsey study that I pointed to that did this wide ranging study on how companies that value design performed better, almost twice as good as benchmarks in their industry.
That is why industrial design gets viewed at a lower tier because it's just not that well understood how industrial design contributes value to the business. And then it's a vicious cycle because people don't understand what the value is and then designers fall into this, “make it pretty” trap where people are just like, “Oh, you're the industrial designers. You just make it look nice after we're done with it”. Then you end up doing that kind of work, which is lower value, and then you continue to fall down that ladder of getting lower and lower value on the business ladder.
Lucy: I think it's also hard when it's such a competitive field as well, working in product. I feel there are so many people wanting to get in that people are often willing to take less or they're willing to take less work on more interesting products as well.
Yeah, totally. I think at a very high level, not just industrial design, but a lot of creative industries have problems valuing their own work or creatives have problems valuing their own work.
Because I think from a young age, you're told like, oh, you enjoy doing this. You don't have to do it for money. You do it for the fun of doing it. But what we're doing is contributing a lot of value to the business and to these big companies and industrial designers obviously have to make a living as well.
It's incumbent on all designers to be more vocal about their value and fight for that value that they believe that they have, and hopefully slowly but surely crawl our way back up to being a highly valued function.
Louis: So how do you convince others that good design is a value add?
Hopefully, I'm not working with people who need to be convinced, but like I said, it's beneficial for everyone to talk about the value of industrial design and make some clear linkage between what we do and the business outcome and also the outcome for the user.
It's a win-win for everyone. The user gets a better product, business makes more money, we make more money, and we have more fulfillment in our work. I think it's important to talk about. Some of the obvious points might be to point at some success stories like Apple, Sonos, Logitech, Peloton. Companies like that, that really put design as a focus of their product development and show how financially successful that has been.
And that's not solely due to the hardware, but all of those companies I think lead with hardware. Like you wouldn't have a Peloton if it was a ugly, unusable device and that Apple hardware gets you into the ecosystem of all the apps and services that come with that.
If you point to success stories like that and you're able to say how industrial design contributed to the success of these companies, I think that's a good story that you can tell people to show the value add of industrial design.
From a personal standpoint, I like to point to the work that I did with a company called R-Zero, which is a UV disinfection system manufacturer that came out of the pandemic. I worked on three products for them, and they were a startup. They started in April of 2020, so right after the lockdowns happened, and they had this idea of taking the technology that was already being used in hospitals and making it accessible to everyday businesses like offices and gyms and hotels and things, and they found that it wasn't really possible to just take the hospital machines and sell them to regular businesses because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that's not for any real hardware reason. That was just because of all the insurance companies involved that were skewing the price way, way up. So they designed their own device that they could then sell to companies at a much lower price point. And we at Bould Design designed their first three products and just with their first product, within three months, they had booked 5 million in sales.
And in 2021 they were generating 13 million. And this year, in 2022, they're projected to triple that.
Lucy: That's a wild trajectory.
Yeah. And all of this is based on, of course, number one, the very strong need for UV disinfection because of the pandemic, but also the industrial design. Because if you look up UVC disinfection devices and see what was being sold in hospitals before they look like industrial disinfection equipment. They look like killer robots that destroy everything in a room that you put them in. And we designed these products for R-Zero that were these beautiful, simple and intuitive looking machines that were optimistic in their aesthetic. We wanted people to feel a sense of calm, a sense of hope when looking at them.
People really resonated with that. People saw these things and they were like, wow, that's a beautiful device that does something that is really needed for my business. And they’ve thought through the usability of it. On the first product, we put these angled handles on the device so that it would be easy to push around (It was on wheels) so that cleaning staff could take it from room to room without having to have it be a hassle. And I think that is personally a huge success story for industrial design because they were building a company based on the products that we designed for them, and they were just named by Forbes, one of the billion dollar startups to watch.
Lucy: That's incredible.
Yeah. I think looking for some examples in your own work to point to and say, I did this as an industrial designer, and this is how it benefited these businesses and these users.
Lucy: And being able to communicate the touchpoints that your design insights were able to uncover.
Could you elaborate on your time on the IDSA’s Diversity, equity and Inclusion Council, and maybe some tips on what we could do to push those goals further?
I served as a member of the IDs A'S Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council from mid 2020 to about May, 2022, and that council was formed in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, which happened in the US in 2020 and set off a movement here and really I think triggered something in the industrial design community to look at our own diversity and see where we were falling short.
It's well known that design in general is quite a white male dominated field, especially in the us. What IDSA set out to do was to tackle this through the help of their community members from a couple of different angles, and there were leaders focused on the educational aspect. There were leaders focused on the professional aspect. There were all sorts of angles we were looking at it from.
I myself was personally most involved in data collection. One of the things that maybe people don't know about me is that I love to mess with spreadsheets and charts and databases, which might be weird for a designer, but I wanted to apply those skills to this, and I thought that it was important that IDSA have good data on the makeup of not only their membership, but also the wider community to see what's the baseline, what are we working with here, and then how can we improve and then continue to gather data and measure against the baseline that was collect.
I helped them to organize a membership survey, which was something that we distributed to all the IDSA members to collect demographic data anonymously. And I also helped them to do that for a public survey. And we analyzed both data sets and we learned all kinds of interesting things about the membership base, some that were predictable and some that were surprising.
We also learned some things about the wider community. From that, IDSA is taking action to create initiatives to address some of the inequities in our field.
So to your other question of what can we all do to maybe address some of these things individually or at our own workplaces, one of the biggest things is to be open-minded about what kind of person fits into your organization. And not always look for the person that is most similar to your group. Because sometimes diversity can be very beneficial to a design group because more opinions, more diversity of thought.
Lucy: More lived experience, more insight.
Yeah. And the ability to design for a wider range of users. How do you design for disabled people or differently abled people if you don't have that experience yourself, you can try to approximate it, but wouldn't it be great if someone on your team had that experience already?
And sourcing more widely For candidates. A lot of the traditional means of acquiring applications for a design position already favor the people that are in those pipelines. People who went to the good design schools, people who already know where to look for the design jobs.
See if there are other channels where you can source more diverse candidates. There is a group called, Where Are All The Black Designers that have a job board that you can post to? You can source some more diverse candidates from there.
Another thing might be to also get more involved in your community and see if there are opportunities to expose people that aren't traditionally exposed to the design career path to the option. Because I think a lot of people don't even learn about design as a career path until their twenties, and that's people that are already privileged and working or already on a track towards the design industry.
A lot of people I've interviewed who are designers, they'd never even found out about industrial design until they were already in university. So how is someone who is less privileged, who is less exposed to those non-traditional career paths, supposed to find out about it? Probably through someone getting involved at their school early on, or being exposed to after school programs that have the creative design component.
Getting more involved with those kinds of things would be probably helpful. And then the last thing I'll just mention is to avoid tokenism. It's not like you have to just go out and grab the first person of color that you see. It's really about creating meaningful engagement with them and having them be part of your community without making them feel like they're just there because they're different.
Lucy: Setting people up for success is really important.
I recently watched a video all about the myth of California and how people journeyed over there for this incredible Amazonian island that was full of gold, which was super interesting because it actually ended up having its own gold rush.
Do you think that the mentality of people looking to improve has really rubbed off on innovation as well, especially when people who really founded Silicon Valley, like Steve Jobs were hippies and experimental and interested in trying to push things in new directions?
Yeah. I think the culture of California is inherently linked to the innovation that happens here.
People here are very open-minded and very willing to try new things. Silicon Valley does have its roots in the combination of that hippie culture with the major innovation hub of Stanford and other surrounding universities in the Bay Area.
There is that myth of people coming to California to start fresh or make it new. And in a way it is kind of true still. People come here to do new things, to try new ideas. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But this is the place to do it. And more and more other places around the US and also other places around the world are trying to replicate that culture. They're trying to make their own Silicon Valleys. They’re trying to make Silicon Alley in New York
And I think to an extent you can do it if you have the right ingredients, but I think the one ingredient that a lot of places are missing is that underlying culture of a new beginning and going west and finding your fortune or whatever it.
In New York, a couple of my friends live there and they tell me that the work culture there is more stratified. You have to pay your dues, you stay in your place until you're 50 years old and you're ready to be like CEO O or whatever. But in San Francisco it's like, “Oh, you're a 22 year old. You're the CEO of your startup. Okay, cool. What's your startup?”. That's good and bad because then you have 22-year-olds making decisions about the fate of the world.
But in a way, that trajectory is also present in my own career path because I was 26 and the founder of a fairly prestigious design firm at that point was like, “Hey, you want to be partners with me?” And I was like, “Me? Okay, sure.” .
Louis: The possibilities sound endless over there. Sounds amazing. Really interesting place to work.
Lucy: Sounds like such a great inspiration to be around so many people who are so open to new ideas as well, and innovation.
Yeah, it's good and bad. As I said before.
Louis: What advice would you give to your younger self starting out?
The advice that I would give to my younger self, and really anyone who is early in their industrial design career is to remember that your job is to make someone else's job easier.
You can interpret that in many ways. You can make it sad like, “Oh, I'm just here to serve other people”. Or you can take it as an opportunity and think, what can I do to make myself useful to other people. And if you take maybe one or two steps extra to show that you're trying to do that, for example, when you set up a meeting, have a clear agenda and have some materials ready to go through in some methodical order. Be clear about what kind of feedback you need or what kind of decisions you need made.
When I was younger, I would just show up to a meeting and be like, “Here's some stuff”. But now I tell all the young designers I work with, come prepared and make it easy for people who are working with you and you are going to be recognized for that. That's really important to remember, and that can be applied to all aspects of the job.
Making a clean CAD file is making it easier for someone else to pick it up. Doing a really well spell checked presentation is making it easier for the presenter, whether it's you or someone else. Think about how you can make things easier for other people and make yourself useful, and you'll naturally get thought of when it's time for a promotion or some sort of advancement.
Another thing would be have a vision for your career. Think about what you want to do and where you want to go. And check in with yourself often and see if that vision still speaks to you, and see how you're progressing towards that vision and reevaluate every once in a while because your vision might change.
You might find that you're going down one path, but you really want to be on another path. And when you're young, that's okay. You can just - actually, whether you're young or old, it's okay. You can switch paths as many times as you like, as long as you're happy with the choices that you're making. Have some idea of where you want to go and keep track of progress and ask yourself frequently whether you're on the right path.
And then just relax, just chill out and be less anxious and nervous about things.
Lucy: I think that's really good advice.
Louis: Yeah. I think that applies to everybody not just in industrial design either.
Lucy: I feel like especially being useful to everyone you work with is one that really stands out as great advice at any stage of your career.
Yeah, still helps me today.
Lucy: Thanks for coming on the show today, Anson. We really loved hearing your story and I'm sure that the audience will as well.
Thank you for having me.