Hasta La Ideas

While we can’t guarantee it will make you any more likely to receive an early morning visit from the Prize Patrol (and in all likelihood employees are ineligible for company sweepstakes), we did want to alert you to the fact that Publishers Clearing House, they of the plentiful pay-by-installment magazine subscriptions and cash prize promises, is looking for a senior web designer to join its Port Washington, New York office. The winning candidates’ responsibilities will include planning, designing, coding, and executing mobile and web-based material, emails, and interactive experiences (many of them probably depicting giant piles of cash!). And don’t forget to ask in advance to be paid by direct desposit rather than in giant novelty checks.

Learn more about and apply for this Senior Web Designer, Publishers Clearing House job or view all the current mediabistro.com design/art/photo jobs.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here’s a welcome bit of attention for our field: Next week Samsung Electronics is launching Design.Samsung.Com, an “online platform presenting influential design stories and solutions to be shared around the world.” The site’s inaugural theme is “Make it Meaningful,” presumably based on this video from last year, where the Galaxy S4 design team discussed their mandate of closely matching their smartphones’ functionality with people’s everyday lives.

But rather than trumpet their past accomplishments, the site is expected to provided glimpses at future technologies as well, if the teaser video is anything to go by:

The website will launch on March 27th.

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That crusty industrial building may not look like much, but it’s special for two reasons. One, it’s located in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, a city with little history of industry, meaning buildings like that are not commonplace. And two, it’s going to become a creative incubation hub to the tune of some CAD $30 million in funding.

The Bayview Yards Innovation Centre, as it’s called, is nearly 46,000 square feet of raw space that will house a rentable digital media and animation lab, meeting and presentation spaces, design studios and a makerspace dedicated to “industrial design, prototyping, fabricating and additive and subtractive manufacturing.”

The aforementioned $30 mil in funding, half of which is from the city and half from the province, isn’t a mere gesture of largesse; the bread is intended to provide “a big boost to the creative sector that has been waiting to emerge in this city for decades.” The local talent-drain problem is well known, with creative types easily lured to cities like Toronto or New York; by giving, say, the industrial design grads at Ottawa’s Carleton University a cool place to make stuff, the government bodies reckon they can hang on to their citizens while creating jobs and wealth.

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Take note: within days steampunk kids across the globe will be clapping their faux leather-gloved hands with glee and trying to invest their bitcoins in something big. Really big. The UK just unveiled the world’s biggest aircraft, and it looks a hell of a lot like a dirigible. Originally developed by the US military for surveillance purposes, the hybrid-airship was dropped due to budget constraints… and possibly the fact that there is nothing subtle about being spied on by a 302 foot long aircraft. It has since been sold to savvy business minds in the UK, who renamed it the Airlander and see affordable cargo and travel in its massive future. Perhaps most importantly, its development is being backed financially and publicly by Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden who also happens to be a commercial pilot and wicked smart investor. (Be still my heart.)

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Images courtesy of Sparse

By Colin Owen, Sparse

Two and a half years ago, three biker/designer/friends sat around a table and discussed designing “something around bikes.” We took a good hard look and decided the industry had largely optimized performance around racing, so we chose to optimize and design for the daily working use of a bike. Two years ago, we incorporated that effort. One year ago, we launched a Kickstarter campaign. This month, we are delivering on Kickstarter promises. In the interim, we have been slaving away on the myriad other things that make our effort a real company and not just (the world’s most infuriating) hobby.

To found a hardware company is to spend your days: need-finding, developing form, developing design, locating and vetting manufacturers, negotiating deals with manufacturers, locating and negotiating financing, setting up a fulfillment network, setting up a sales network, certifying the product, verifying taxation rates, fretting over foreign laws written in foreign tongues, networking, fundraising, project management, (endlessly) monitoring manufacturing, and marketing (whatever that means).

Compare all of that to the list of skills that we, as product designers, attain in school and in consulting: need-finding, form, various types of digital, physical and visual representation, mechanical integration, production processes, the pitch.

There are approximately three things that overlap between the two lists. We, Sparse, have accomplished or at least attempted the rest via: getting it flatly wrong the first time; imperfect iterative efforts; HUGE singular efforts; hiring the person who knows the answer; chatting with a friend who is further along the development curve; pulling favors; borrowing money; traveling to far-away places; befriending reporters; and mainlining black tar… er, coffee.

There are others who write more cogently on startup culture in general, and productivity in specific than I can achieve (which is why I’ve included wonderful references at the bottom of the article). What follows is a handful of insights into the narrow turf of hardware development as a bootstrapped startup.

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