Hasta La Ideas

Karen Hofmann of Art Center College of Design

Reporting & photo by Lisa Krohn

Remember the days when all you needed to be a crack industrial designer was a knack for drawing, rendering and model making? Then we added the skills of how to talk to clients and well, that already seemed like enough. But then throw in 3D modeling and rendering, the understanding of materials—how they interact, their underlying structure—and how things are made, both for prototypes and for mass-produced objects. But wait. Now the online world is possibly more impactful than the “meat” world—so add web and mobile savvy, search engine optimization and you haven’t even gotten started, because guess what? Now we all need to be fantastic entrepreneurs too. Oh, and that corporate job you might have hoped for after racking up a sizable student debt for your design training just might not really be around any more. Why? Because we are living in the era of downsizing and shifting jobs from full to part time to freelance to overseas. Now this may all seem gloomy, but the speakers at this year’s IDSA Western District Conference—held at the Long Beach Hilton Executive Meeting Center on April 12–13—presented some serious silver linings to these storm clouds.

Dario Antonioni of Orange22 Design Lab came to the podium singing the praises of this new order, declaring that the design consultancy model is obsolete. His company had 15 full time employees until 2008, but now he has none. Instead, he works with a network of services and partners throughout the world—he’s done with working 9-to-5 (or more).

Antonioni and his fellow “venture incubators” believe that if you look at it the right way, we are in the midst of a renaissance for designers in that funding for independent entrepreneurial projects is more accessible than ever before. It turned out that most of the speakers at this conference share his belief that there is a much more democratic system emerging for “pitching” your ideas. Unlike even the recent past, when designers needed a great job, client, investor, angel, venture capital group or independent means to take an idea beyond the drawing board, there are three cool new ways to bring your ideas to life:

– Preselling – Where 50% of the retail price of an item is collected at the time of the order, used to produce the item, for which the balance is charged at the time of shipping.

– Licensing – a.k.a. renting your ideas and designs.

– Crowdfunding – The best known platform for this is Kickstarter, where you go public with your design in the form of a video similar to a movie trailer and raise the money to produce your project from friends, friends of friends, family and strangers.

Dario related his recent success with a furniture venture, the Botanist Series, which he marketed by inviting high profile designers to decorate a minimal but otherwise generic bench or table with color, etching, graphics and perforations. Each guest designer chose a charity to support with a percentage of each sale. All of this contributed to the buzz, which allowed Dario and his now virtual team to raise almost $37K to be funded on Kickstarter.

But Dario wasn’t the only designer in the house who is streamlining his company while increasing its global reach and recognition. Art Center graduate Gabriel Wartofsky also successfully used Kickstarter to raise the $25K he needed to produce his brilliant Conscious Commuter folding bike, which has a rechargeable electric motor for the urban commuter. He felt that the three keys to a winning new product are: marketability, technical feasibility and protectability. He also mentioned that research is about “getting out of the bubble of your own mind.”

Conscious Commuter by Gabriel Wartofsky

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