Oct 22, 2021Buy Better Stuff | Who wishes they took design at school?When you last bought a new chair, some cutlery or a toaster what influenced your decision? What do you base your choices on? Was it how they looked or felt? Was it the price alone, or the materials it’s made from?, how durable it might be?, …Design7 min read
Sep 14, 2021My dad is a salesman…and he has something to teach us.Industrial Design: sales or order taking? My dad has had a career in sales. He’s sold a number of different things in his career, and not surprisingly he has some good stories to tell. There are characters and situations some inspiring and others horrifying, but all engaging. …Industrial Design5 min read
Jun 22, 2021The Empathetic ObjectCan an inanimate object really empathize with you? The Longman dictionary defines empathy as…”the capacity for imaginatively sharing in another’s feelings or ideas.” Objects of course don’t have imagination but what they can do is carry the imagination of those who created them. They cannot feel or have ideas but…Industrial Design5 min read
Published in fig40·Dec 4, 2020Possibilities | an invitation to product development.Almost every small business today is looking for “the great what’s next” — how do we navigate the current challenges and what will things be like when we’re through them? This is becoming increasingly difficult predict but like everyone else, we’re working on it. Of course no one really knows…Design3 min read
Published in fig40·Dec 16, 2019Designed to start a conversationFig40’s B-Sides. “Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).” -Bruce Mao, An incomplete manifesto for growth In the days of vinyl singles, the song you bought was the A-side. But there was always a B-side, and you never new what that song was. The B-side was often viewed…Design3 min read
Published in fig40·Nov 12, 2019One Industrial Designers definition for a beautiful object.Transubstantiation To call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognize it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing, a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium. Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness I suspect few designers would argue with the above statement…Design3 min read
Published in fig40·Oct 1, 2019Member-onlyThe sacredness of materialsThings left at the curb on garbage day make me sad. I’m one of those people who thinks ‘things’ have identity, they have character and personality. Seeing them at the side of the road, has a whiff of death about it. I can’t help but think that someone bought that…Design4 min read
Published in fig40·May 14, 2019Biophilia, Milan and the evolving design of office furniture.Design week in Milan is a really glorious affair. To start with, it’s in Milan, it’s in the spring and it’s the culmination of so much of the world’s creative energy. On my first visit a few years ago I came away with much more than I anticipated going in…Design4 min read
Published in fig40·Sep 21, 2018Your Chair is Your Neighbour Too.neighbour: ‘(of a place or thing) being situated next to or very near (another).’ We all have neighbours. We’ve all had good ones and we’ve had bad ones. Just to say you have a neighbour tends not to tell you much about them. But the act of being ‘neighbourly’ is…Design5 min read
Published in fig40·Apr 16, 2018Deep CollaborationHow we became better designers. A few years ago I saw a video of the Tesla Model S being assembled. To this day it remains very clear in my memory. It was an early prototype or pre-production car set in the beautiful Fremont factory complete with shiny red robots. The…Design4 min read
