Hasta La Ideas

In just two weeks a new design conference will be held in Seoul, called the iDEA Herald Design Forum. Disappointingly they haven’t bothered to build a website to promote it, despite pulling in some design heavyweights—Karim Rashid, Chris Bangle—o speak at the conference.

The “Herald” in the conference title refers to the conference’s organizer, publishing company Herald Media, and while they’ve neglected to build a conference website, they’re at least attempting to promote the event by publishing an interview with Rashid through their Korea Herald newspaper arm. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Q: A design war is raging in the corporate world. As seen in Apple, design superiority seems to equal product superiority. How do you predict the future global trend of industrial design?

A: I love this question and the idea of a design war. What frustrates me though is the fact that many companies honestly are in a war for business market share, but don’t realize that design is the only really brand differentiator today! Sony, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. are all lost when it comes to finding their own vernacular, their own brand identity. They have no idea how to differentiate themselves as Apple did. Also since all these hi-tech objects are dematerializing, and most of the internal components are ubiquitous and the same it is even more important to use design to create and take ownership of a brand.

Read the full interview, which is nice ‘n lengthy at 1800 words, here.

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