Category Archives: Thoughts

How to become a designer?

This is a question I often get asked, usually by super-inquisitive 10-year-olds, who haven’t realised that they most likely already are designers, and simply need the world to take note. Nonetheless, whether you are or not, this is the time to start! Below is my 5-minute advice for becoming a designer:

  1. Take time to fall in love with your art, master tools, techniques, materials – anything that can help you communicate your ideas to others. This can be prototyping something in LEGO bricks, cutting, gluing, drawing, painting, trying your hand at Sketchup creating 3D models of objects or just making them out of plaster or clay. Make magazine and instructables are a great source of ideas of how to make stuff!
  2. Read and be inspired broadly and deeply – about how things work, how people think, how cultures came about, be curious and generally ask ‘why’ about mostly everything and take time to look for the answer, and when you think you found it, ask why again.
  3. Dream and think ‘what if’? Combine the unlikeliest extremes, or just what seems fun and outrageous and become comfortable at thinking it through – the good bits, the bad bits and how you make something better. Try to make your ideas into a piece of music, a story, a movie, a picture.. learn to turn your dreams into something others can be inspired by.
  4. Seek the company of people who energise you, avoid the company of those who don’t. Life’s too short for people who tell you things can’t be done – we achieve what we believe we are capable of so find people who build you up, and be that someone for someone else.
  5. Find a project! Go to design school, do stuff – the more things you try to master, the richer the ideas. Maths is good for working out engineering stuff (how things work and how to build things), English is good for explaining why your idea is important, business skills are good for working out if your idea will help you retire to a desert island as a rich millionaire one day or not and so on.. most things in school seem dull and boring, but they can all help you work out better ideas – like the kid who came up with a better way to place solar panels based on the Fibonacci sequence, paying attention in biology class and walking in a forest. http://chevyvolt.cm.fmpub.net/#http://inhabitat.com/13-year-old-makes-solar-power-breakthrough-by-harnessing-the-fibonacci-sequence/

3 things I wish I knew as a student and 8 things I have learned since!

Last week I had the pleasure to return to my alma mater, Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, for a talk on my career since I graduated 10 years ago. The college has recently moved to a splendid new building in Kings’ Cross, London, and the joy was all mine to see friends, tutors and old faces again, while offering my thoughts to the students now studying product-, industrial design, and innovation management.

While I could bore everyone to tears about all the LEGO models and product lines I have worked on over my career at the LEGO Group, a far more interesting thing to share is the second half of my presentation, which is all about the things I wish I knew when I was a student and my attempt to capture all the things I have learned since. My presentation was mostly a series of stories and anecdotes, captured by the sentences on these slides, and if I manage to – I will try to write some of them on this blog in the coming weeks.

In the meantime – I hope you enjoy them and again, comments are really what blogs are all about so if you feel inspired, drop me a note below.

View more presentations from cweckstrom.

Why experience design is important

Seth Godin makes an excellent point in his post, that marketeers all too frequently make the mistake in thinking to grow their business they need to move from selling nuts to squirrels to convincing dolphins nuts are delicious.

Worldview changes three things: attention, bias and vernacular. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we’ve decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate with people differently based on their worldview.

It’s extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to change someone’s worldview. The guys at Opus One shouldn’t spend a lot of time marketing expensive wine to fraternities because it’s not efficient. Sell nuts to squirrels, don’t try to persuade dolphins that nuts are delicious.

And this is why experience design is so very important. First, because to develop a strong product or service experience you need to understand about the attention, bias and vernacular that will determine the worldview of your customers, and their expectation of how the experience will be. To do this you cannot sit in a lab, you need to be out there with customers getting this under your skin. By understanding their world-views or even how similar or different the world-views are among your customers you can better develop solutions that address needs than if you just tried to guess your way to it. So observation is one, and no harm in that. The other really interesting exercise is co-creating solutions with your customers. You will learn more about what is important to people, their needs and behaviours than if you just put a solution in front of them and asked if they like it. Co-creation is a way of getting to understanding what drives people, their attention, bias and vernacular that otherwise would be hard to uncover.

What’s the point of coming up with a great experience? Very simply that people are the ultimate marketing channel, and experiences that work are delightful and make us to come back. Better still, we come back with our friends. Incidentally, if you deliver an experience well enough, this positive momentum may even convince some dolphins that nuts aren’t so bad after all. Facebook is a case in point, that Godin mentions in his post too. Most of us now on Facebook thought of it as a waste of time, but over time as we found more and more of our friends on it, we took the leap too.

If you are one of the few doing a great experience you will outlast your competition without a sweat. If more and more people are getting their experiences right, you need to truly innovate to stay ahead of the game. In either case marketing will not solve the problem, it will simply create awareness. In the case of a bad experience marketing may make more people try it, but they will never come back and worse still: they may tell their friends not to try it either. If your experience is great, marketing will spread awareness but this in conjunction with the positive word of mouth will take awareness far further than marketing could on its own, it will make the growth sustainable. To me marketing is an amplifier, so be careful what you amplify. And yes, experience design and innovation is critical and a way to market what you do in the best way possible, by creating happy users.

If in doubt, make something!

Quite a few interesting things have happened recently that make me think there is more to this than meets the eye. Hear me out. On one hand we are and have been excited by all things social media, online, new ways of interfacing with media (think Iphone and Ipad) and so on. It is exciting, yet at the same time we are also getting smarter about the limitations of digital, and appreciating afresh what it really means to make something with your own hands (think the rise of hacking (e.g changing something to do something different beyond its original purpose – physical or virtual, Maker faires and Instructables). Talking about what we have made online is also fun, because we can make the most out of the connectivity, while also making the most of the real world around us. Somehow too many solutions and activities have forced us to make a choice between these two worlds, and what is exciting to see is how these are being mashed up together. A few bits of inspiration

Soulcraftcandy.com After years of procrastination, my other half Jon, nicknamed Q (after Q in James Bond movies who can make anything, Jon can too, except exploding telephone boxes are not allowed in the house :) ) finally took the plunge and has started sharing some of his sketches and amazing creations over on his blog. He is a guy that doesn’t just do stuff, he thinks a lot about the process of making things too, and now shares it with posterity. Some deep thinking and great cartoons to boot – and far more regular at posting than me so check it out.

Making is Connecting – my good friend David Gauntlett has pulled yet another rabbit out of the hat with his new book, which puts the topics I touched on above into a historical and cultural perspective, while providing an excellent analysis of what it really means to make something and share it with others, for our sense of self, purpose and the meaning we create in our lives. Hugely inspirational reading!

Handmade – this was one of those great surprises that arrived just before Christmas and the outcome of a happy coincidence that reminded me just how funny life can be. Some time ago David Gauntlett got in touch with me and told be about this Tessy Britton and her travelling pantry idea and that she was wondering whether I could help her out with some LEGO bricks, because they would just be the best thing to help people in communities articulate their ideas about how to do more together. I thought this sounded exciting so without further ado I pulled some of my own rabbits out of a hat and Tessy got some bricks. Then things were quiet for a long time and next thing I hear is from David that Tessy’s put together a book about all the things she discovered when doing the travelling pantry.

Out of the Ordinary – so this is when things get spooky and just shows how connected we really are without realising it. So lovely Sarah, other half of Mark Earls, another dear friend, chief brainbox, and father of  the herd thinking that has helped the rest of us put words around what really is happening when we find ourselves mimicking the behaviours of unknown strangers ( I digress), contacted Jon and said he definitely had to get in touch with these guys behind Out of the Ordinary. Low and behold, the paths lead back to David and Tessy.. it is a small world, but alas, a creative one!

So my conclusion, dear friends, is that if in doubt – make something, and better still: find a way to share it with others and the world may just be your oyster! At least you will not run out of interesting like minds to be excited and inspired by, and in those dark hours when you think no one cares, you might just be surprised. I certainly will never forget the instance when I, caught up in too much self-critique, decided to delete one of my posts. (story reposted here and perhaps a very early bit of thinking about how we need to match what we go through in our minds with something physical otherwise our progress just doesn’t feel as ‘real’ as it should).

And it really is the most surprising things that people will miss, so don’t be a bore – share it and you will see.

Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us

An excellent book by Dan Pink, this follows nicely after my previous post about Creativity as a basic human need. Of course, if you like things short, the best way to enjoy this book in less than 10 minutes is to watch this excellent RSA animation of Dan’s talk.