Hasta La Ideas

You may have to wait six months to a year to get on the shelves after a buyer agrees to sell your product

So let’s talk money.

In the first article in this series about product licensing for industrial designers, I presented a vision of what is possible—positive, encouraging, optimistic but slightly cautionary. Here, I am interested in throwing out some numbers so that you can decide if licensing might make sense for you (or under what conditions it would).

It is important to understand that there is no “standard” contract across industries or even within a company. Everything is generally negotiable and there are many ways that compensation can pan out. The most common mode is for a company to compensate through royalties only, which helps mitigate their risk that the product may not sell well. It is also possible for the designer to receive up-front cash in addition to royalties, but often this is just an advance payment deducted from future royalties. But this is still good if you can get it, because there is no guarantee that there will be future royalties. Hence, companies usually only agree to advances if the amount is relatively small and/or if they are confident that the product will sell. Insisting on significant money up front is often a quick way to sour a deal.

OXO offers licensors both cash buyouts and royalty deals

Some companies prefer to buy the intellectual property outright in one lump sum—as with Ikea, for example. This is more of a gamble for the licensee, but saves the administrative hassle of calculating and cutting royalty checks, as well as the risk and cost of potential contract re-negotiation or disputes with the licensor (you). But with this risk comes the reward of saving all the royalties they would have paid out if the product proved particularly successful. Some companies like OXO consider both the royalty and cash-buyout options.

Companies can also offer an equity stake in the business that surrounds the product. This is much less common, however, and occurs usually when the designer brings more to the table than just a single new product idea (e.g. name cache, design services for a whole product line, expertise and connections, or even money). More established designers/consultancies do this, like Yves Behar’s fuseproject that has had at least 18 equity partners including, more recently, with Core77 Design Awards 2012 Notable for Consumer Products, Sabi.

Fuseproject’s recent joint venture, Sabi pill products

I am going to focus however on the most common approach—royalties-only. In doing so, I want to emphasize the need to understand the licensee’s position. Being in the mass-manufacturing business is tough! There are high start-up costs with tooling and initial inventory, increasing pressures from mass retailers (like having to take back product if it does not sell!), overhead costs of product development and sales teams, stiff global competition, changing regulations, expensive and lengthy certifications, insurance, etc.

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“Drawing the Passage of Time” by Niek de Snoo; photo by Ray Hu

When What Is Natural for Some Is Not for Others: Culture and Design

I was in Asia, giving a talk. I was given a remote controller for advancing my slides. This one had with two buttons, one above the other. I dislike traditional slides with long streams of text that the speaker reads to the audience, so I have a rule: “No words.” Most of my slides are photographs. I was all ready for the first photograph, but when I pushed the upper button to advance to the slide, I was flustered: I went backwards through my slide set, not forward.

“How could this happen?” I wondered. To me, top obviously means forward, bottom backwards. The mapping is clear and obvious. If the buttons had been side-by-side, then the control would have been ambiguous: which comes first, right or left? It isn’t clear. But this controller used the correct mapping of top and bottom? Why was this control designed incorrectly?

I decided to use this as an example of design for the audience. I showed them the controller and asked: “to get to my next slide, which button should I push, the top or the button?” To my great surprise, the audience was split in their responses. Many thought that it should be the top button, just as I had thought. But a large number thought it should be the bottom.

What’s the correct answer? I discovered that as I asked this question around the world that some people firmly believe that it is the top button and some, just as firmly, believe it is the bottom button. Each is surprised to learn that someone might think differently. Who is correct? Both are.

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Bamboo Electric Vehicle, Professor Matsuhige Kazumi, Kyoto University from “Rethinking Bamboo” exhibition at the Beijing Design Triennale 2011

In February this year I decided to give up a cozy life in West London and move to Qingdao, China, to head up the first overseas office for one of the world’s leading industrial design consultancies, Priestmangoode.

In recent years the design industry has become less narrowly focused on the West and increasingly global. From Sao Paulo to Beijing—which will be running its second Design Week later this year—design hubs are now dotted all around the world.

This is not so much a shift away from the West, but the creation of new design centres (especially in emerging markets) where previously there were none. The opportunities presented by this combination of rapid development (and nowhere has it been more rapid than in China) and the West’s long history of using design, promise to be very exciting. It is wanting to be right at the meeting point of these two design cultures that motivated me to come to China in the first place: to both observe and have a part in shaping what will hopefully be a more globally inclusive industry.

At Priestmangoode, we have already been working in China for several years, and whilst there are some similarities between the way things are done there and in the West, there are many differences too. The scale of many of China’s projects and companies is impressive (Qingdao is home to the world’s longest bridge over water, electronics giant Huawei is the word’s second largest supplier of mobile communications infrastructure, to name just two examples) but what is perhaps more interesting is the speed at which projects are completed and products launched.

Not unlike some other Asian electronics companies, the approach of many Chinese manufacturers is often to launch several models of a particular product type in quick succession, each either building on the last or exploring a different market niche. Whilst this does lead to vast product portfolios, and some lapses in quality, it does mean that the needs of small, otherwise alienated, consumer groups can be met, and products refined ‘in-use’, a process we are unfamiliar with in the West.

There are merits to both this approach and the West’s focus on quality of choice rather than quantity, and the potential for a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge is very promising for the future of design.

This column will explore these and other issues surrounding not just design but also living and working in China. It is not meant to be a systematic portrait of, or be the defining authority on, doing business in China. Its intention is to provide some insight into the Chinese design industry from someone on the ground, as well as the differences in office culture and work ethic. I will consider the value of design in China, how consumer culture is so completely different and what misconceptions we have (and bad advice we are given) about working in China.

China is actively trying to shed its image as a country of cheap manufacture. Rather than ‘Made in China’, the future lies with products that are ‘Designed in China’. I will be looking at how and where the changes necessary for this to happen manifest themselves. I will also be considering what challenges face a country with such vastly different regions when trying to establish a distinct design identity, more or less from scratch.

In doing so I hope to bring a little objective clarity into a fast-changing industry in a fascinating country, dropping in any interesting observations, thoughts on my favourite places and things to do in China along the way.

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Communities in China use a lot of outdoor furniture. And chairs, laundry, food preparation, morning ablutions all spill out onto the narrowhutong and urban streets. Because they do, everyday people create the infrastructure to support these activities. Much of the furniture is outside year-round, with owners making a minimal effort to keep it protected from the elements. When there is the threat of rain, for instance, they angle chairs against walls to ensure the rain runs off instead of puddling and potentially soaking the wood.

In the United States, the Shakers are often lauded for their carefully observed furniture designs, including their hanging furniture—grandfather clocks, bookshelves, chairs placed on racks with neatly spaced hooks, and defying gravity.

Image by Dave Morris/Flickr

Simple and elegant as the Shaker style is—including their signature practice of storing chairs hanging upside down—I’d argue that the Chinese DIY chair storage is just as, if not more elegant than the Shaker hanging furniture, since it can apply to most high-back chair designs and also works with any wall.

The type of noticeboard frame seen in my hutong photo is fairly common in Chinese cities, so the lean-forward approach with the hind legs wedged under the frame requires minimal preparation for use. And, in terms of effective user-friendly design, the subtle repositioning of a rained-soaked chair with one hand allows the owner to easily wipe the surface with the other hand.

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We live in dichotomous times, navigating between conflicting imperatives, contradictory values, and eleventh-hour urgency. For designers, these dichotomies—far from providing generative yin/yang grist or complementary dualist push and pull—represent paradoxes that lash at our profession, our practice, and our promise. Lately I’ve been losing some sleep over them, so best to get this down on paper as part of Core77’s Apocalypse 2012 Series. Exactly 1000 words, below.

We’re at the apex of our power, but the nadir of our potency. Let’s start with the biggest heartbreaker of them all: We are at a moment in history when, as designers, we are at our most powerful. There is almost nothing we cannot make, enjoying the triumphs of research and development in materials science, manufacturing technology, and information systems. We can get any answer we seek through social networks, peer communities, or hired guns. We have sub-specialties at unimaginably thin slices of expertise—from ubiquitous computing to synthetic biology—and a plumbing system in the Internet that is simultaneously unprecedented in human history and entirely taken for granted.

At the same time, unbelievably, we have never been in worse shape: We are witnessing the collapse of every natural system on earth. Take your pick—on the ground we’ve got clear-cutting, desertification and agricultural run-off. Underneath we’ve got fracking and groundwater contamination. In the air, greenhouse gasses; in the oceans, ice sheet melting, acidification and Pacific trash vortices; in space we have the ghastly and ultimately impossible problem of space debris (we won’t be able to leave even when we’re ready to, and nobody will be able to get in to help us if they wanted to). We carry body-burdens of toxic chemicals leached and outgassed from our homes, our cars, our food packaging. The consequences of industrialization metastasize out to slave factory labor, massive river diversions, obesity, malnutrition, gender inequality, rampant poverty, minefields. We tax our economies with war machinery instead of fueling healthcare and education provision. We feel helpless on the one end and hopeless on the other.

How can we be so strong and yet so weak? How can it be that we, as a species, are at the absolute height of our power at exactly the same moment that we are on the precipice of self-annihilation?

Is this funny? Or ironic? Or tragic? Or simply unthinkable. Whatever your reaction, for the design community, it is decidedly two things: rare and privileged. Design has been complicit in moving us to this precipice, of course, and certainly it alone will not be sufficient for pulling us back, but we need to acknowledge the fact that this time, and our place in it, are truly remarkable: We are equipped with our most powerful tools, right when the world needs us most. This is an astounding proposition for design.

The design of artifacts versus the design of systems. If all of these natural collapses have demonstrated one thing, it’s that we are no longer living in a world of objects and things, but rather in a world of flows and negotiations. Undoubtedly this was always the case, but the feedback we’re getting from the natural world has made it unassailable. In the old design model, we had ‘problems’ and we had ‘solutions.’ A designer’s job was to take a problem—a brief, a market need, a new technology looking for an embodiment—and to solve it: Here’s the problem; here’s a solution. Next problem please.

We are now recognizing that this worldview is unbearably naïve and not a little arrogant; that problems are not static, they’re dynamic. They are moving, organic and fundamentally systemic. You might say that they aren’t even “problems” at all; they are “problem spaces”—a term progressive designers have been using for years. But I’d argue that you don’t “solve” problem spaces, you negotiate them. And that this negotiation requires new kinds of processes, fluencies and participants. This is the new design practice that is emerging all around us: it’s inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary; it is tactical; it concerns itself with things like resiliency and sharing ecologies, and pays as much attention to meaning as to money. And it explores entirely new kinds of currency and value—currencies like participation, and reputation, and access, and happiness.

Is it possible that we feel powerless to ‘solve’ problems because we’re (simply) using the wrong word to address them?

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