Hasta La Ideas

As Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club quickly approaches, we thought we’d give you a little insight in to our speaker, Chris Hoffman, and his RYNO: an innovative self-balancing, one wheel, electric scooter. Chris will be speaking next Tuesday, May 31st at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland at 6PM.

Curiosity Club: As designer and engineer you specialize in two fields that can at times be at odds in the product development process. Do you have advice for designers and engineers on how to communicate ideas, inspiration and practicality?

Chris Hoffman: Not sure what “fields” means in this context but if you’re talking about design attributes that are at odds they might be:

a) Simplicity as opposed to useless complexity
b) Usefulness as to cost of manufacturing that feature
c) Visible quality as to real longevity

Regardless, before you start any design project you have to start with refining why you’re designing the product. How does it align with projecting the culture of the brand and how will the product compete in the market based on what features. This all has to be identified before you start the design. Otherwise there is no way to know how to tell the story. Remember, everything we buy has to entertain us, connect us to a peer group, display our position in that group and make us feel like we made the right purchase choice long before we look at the real features of the product.

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