Hasta La Ideas

Whether it’s skiing, running, or pushing the pedals on the road or single track, your body needs fuel to keep moving. As much as we’d like to nosh on a burrito during a long ride, it doesn’t exactly travel well. There’s no shortage…

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The Urchin, a pebble-shaped “ready for anything” Bluetooth speaker designed by frog and home audio manufacturer Sound United

This is the sixth post in our Getting Hired series. Last week we talked to key HR personnel at LUNAR, IDEO, Philips, BMW Group Designworks USA and Smart Design.

In a twist on the more famous dictum, frog design‘s founder, Harmut Esslinger, once stated that “form follows emotion.” With an emphasis on designing products and experiences that connect beyond mere functionality, frog has stayed true to this ethos over its 44 years in business. The company’s 600 employees are loosely divided into three informal categories: designers, technologists and strategists. Kerstin Feix, frog’s AVP, Head of Global Human Resources, oversees the HR team in the company’s nine studios worldwide. James Cortese, frog’s Director of Marketing, also contributed to this interview.

Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new industrial designer?

Kerstin Feix: For every discipline we have a special process. Every job opening is always on the website—but it makes sense to apply even if there’s not a job opening. As a consultancy, it’s important that we maintain a pipeline of candidates.

It’s most important for us to see your portfolio. We prefer either a PDF or a link to your website. I would say it’s less about your school degree and more about your skill set, your personality and your past experience. In the best case scenario, you know somebody within frog, because referrals get handled with extra care.

If we think the portfolio is strong enough, we invite the candidate to an initial screening call handled by the recruiter. After that, we invite candidates into our studio, and we start the interview process with a portfolio presentation. Here they have a chance to meet different levels of employees, not only managers but designers as well. They also get a look and feel—who are the people that they might work with in the future? The portfolio presentations gives candidates a chance to tell a story, to showcase their own personal experience and to convince the people in the room that they are the right fit.

What makes good candidates stand out?

KF: When you look at the portfolio, ideally it blows you away. That’s basic. At frog it’s the culture fit that’s so important, because we know that even if a candidate has the perfect technical skill-set, they can create much more damage than benefit if they’re not a cultural match. It’s important for the morale and the team in general to find people who fit.

James Cortese: I’m trying to qualify what makes a frog. It’s a combination of someone who has an original point of view, but they’re also very democratic and open to new ideas. There’s a willingness to challenge their own assumptions based on what they’ve learned from the people around them and the people that they work with. A sense of irreverence tempered by a sense of professionalism.

KF: I sometimes even used the word rebel. You need to be a rebel in your heart, which means that you like to challenge and question things—but you are also able to play on a team. We work in a consultancy, so it’s important to understand that we are passionate about changing the world, but we’re also a business.

Kerstin Feix, frog’s AVP, Head of Global Human Resources, and James Cortese, Director of Marketing

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie we filmed during Dutch Design Week, designer Maarten Baas gives us an exclusive tour of his studio on a former farm a few miles north of Eindhoven. 

“This place used to be a farm; the chickens and the pigs used to walk around here,” says Baas, who we interviewed in his office in the converted attic of the former farmhouse. “Now we turned it into a design studio.”

Baas’ office is home to the original Smoke Chair that he produced for his graduation project while at Design Academy Eindhoven, which is now manufactured by Dutch design brand Moooi.

“This was the prototype on which Moooi based the Smoke Chair,” Baas says. “It’s actually burnt furniture with an epoxy resin that sucks into the charcoal. It has been reproduced many times by Moooi, and still we make unique pieces here at the farm.”

Baas, who moved to the farm in 2009 with fellow designer Bas den Herder, converted the barn into a workshop where he produces other pieces of furniture such as his famous Clay series, created by moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame.

“We squeeze our hands in the clay, you can see the fingerprints,” explains Baas. “After that, it dries out and it stays like furniture.”

Downstairs, Baas is in the middle of filming for his new Grandmother Clock, commissioned by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in which an old lady seems to draw the time using a marker pen from inside the clock.

“You’re very lucky to be here just at the moment that we are filming the new Grandmother Clock,” Baas says. “What you see here is a little cabin in which the grandmother will sit and a video that is recording her. The grandmother will indicate the time every minute with a marker. She will draw the big hand and the small hand and after a minute she wipes away the big hand, does one minute later and like that she goes around the clock.”

Baas then takes us outside to show us his workshop in the barn, as well as a small sauna he made inside an old wooden caravan, before showing us a limited edition piece of Smoke furniture that is in the process of being charred with a blow-torch.

“This is a chair that we are burning for a client,” Baas starts to say, before having second thoughts about explaining the process in detail. “Ah, f**k it,” he says. “I’m not going to say.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

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Ad creatives Jason Bramley, Jonny Biggins and Steve Hanson have launched a website selling personalised books that combine randomly generated trivia with artwork from leading illustrators.

The Book of Everyone offers 50-page digital, paper or hardback books. Customers are asked to enter the name and date of birth of the person they’d like to make a book for, followed by their own name, and a preview is ready to view in around thirty seconds. Users can then edit some pages further, choosing subjects the recipient is most likely think about or super powers that would best suit their personality.

The finished result is a collection of weird and fascinating facts illustrated by creatives including Brosmind, Jean Julien, Malike Favre, MVM, Ian Stevenson and Supermundane.

Trivia includes the likely weight of all the food you’ve consumed in your life time or how many heart beats you’ve experienced, as well as the usual list of chart hits, popular TV shows and world leaders on the day/year/month you were born. Stats in each book are generated using a custom database that contains more than 130,000 scenarios and took developers Hugh Williams and Dan Evans-Jones two years to make.

Of course, personalised books are nothing new but Biggins, Bramley and Hanson felt there was still a gap in the market, which is why they decided to launch the business in 2012.

“We decided to build a technology platform that could create a beautiful personalised book around anyone in a few seconds…something that was well written rather than skimming off the web and tha used a great roster of designers and illustrators to make every page. We wanted every book to feel upbeat and celebratory, with lots of little curious facts and weird witticisms to keep you leafing through,” say Hanson and Biggins.

To celebrate its launch, The Book of Everyone is hosting an exhibition at KK Outlet featuring work from contributing illustrators and a collection of sample books. Biggins and Hanson also say they are interested in launching greetings cards and merchandising but have no fixed plans just yet.

“It’s a great opportunity to work with lots of different styles and work with loads of great artists, [and] we really encourage the collaborators to have fun and make their own interpretation of the assignment,” say the pair.

Supermundane, you can store 1,000 terabytes of memories in your head.

As it’s all compiled digitally, The Book of Everyone lacks a certain hand-crafted appeal but the custom platform makes ordering one quick and simple. Each copy includes some excellent illustrations and Biggins and Hanson say they will be commissioning new work on a regular basis.

“We really want to work with all the illustrators again, while at the same time adding adding to the list of great people that we work with. The nature of The Book of Everyone means that we are always looking for new contributors,” they add.

Malika Favre

Jean Julien – the word eco terrorist was added to the diction

Patrick Kyle, the Gameboy was the biggest selling toy in 1989

The Book of Everyone launch takes place at KK Outlet, London N1 6PB on Thursday January 30. For details see thebookofeveryone.co

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