Designer Q&A with Rob Curedale

Designer Q&A is a new feature on Design Droplets. In it we sit down and chat with some of the thought leaders in the field of design. For our very first Q&A we are lucky enough to have with us Australian born, US based, Industrial Designer Rob Curedale. Rob has extensive experience in many areas of design and has been featured on Core77, the Discovery Channel and in Innovation Magazine.




1. Hi Rob. Welcome to Design Droplets, its a pleasure to have you talking to us. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

I was was born in Australia and have worked as a designer, design director and design educator in London, Sydney, Vevey, Switzerland, Portugal, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, China and Detroit. I managed the development of furniture, medical, technology and consumer products as a consultant and in-house design manager at corporate offices and consultancies including frog and Hauser in the United States, Philips,  PDD in London and Sebel, Axis and KWA in Sydney.
Clients of mine include, among others, HP, Philips, GEC, Nokia, Sun, Apple, Canon, Motorola, Nissan, Audi VW, Disney, RTKL, The Government of the United Arab Emirates, The Royal British and Australian Navy and Airforce, Steelcase, Hon, Castelli, Gensler, Honeywell, NEC, Hoover, Packard Bell, Dell, Black & Decker and Harmon Kardon.

I was also the Director of US Operations for an Industrial design and manufacturing sourcing consultancy based in Hong Kong and the North America Design Manager at Haworth, then the second largest furniture manufacturer in the world (45 factories).

My teaching experience includes Yale, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Art Center Europe; a faculty member at Sydney College of the Arts and UTS Sydney. Chair of Product Design and Chair of Furniture Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit (the largest Product Design school in North America), Escola De Artes e Design Matosinhos in Oporto Portugal, The Pratt Institute, Instituto De Artes Visuals, Design e Marketing (Lisbon), Southern Yangtze University, Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and Nanjing Arts Institute in China.

2.That is a pretty diverse career. You have spent time in so many various parts of the world, from Sydney to Silicon Valley. Have you noticed any distinct differences in design cultures?

The differences between design cultures in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia are many. The scale of manufacturing in the United States means that there is more specialization within the process of design and manufacturing than in Europe or Australia.

The relationship between Stanford University and business with manufacturing in Silicon Valley has meant that there has been greater financial and engineering support for industrial designers there than elsewhere and this attracted some of the most capable designers in the world like Hartmutt Eslinger, Jonathan Ives, Yves Behar and Bill Moggridge to the area.

Australian and UK Industrial Designers tend to have a better knowledge of manufacturing, engineering and global design trends than many US Industrial Designers. Design Research is a growing activity in the United States and an important part of most projects.

Design is seen here as a servant of industry whereas in Europe it is seen also as an instrument of positive social change. Marketing has a bigger influence on design here than in other parts of the world. In China the cultural resistance to interpersonal opposition limits the success of the early ideation stages, however it is needed there as it is a necessary part of reaching the best solutions.

In Spain, Portugal and Italy there is a sense of cultural history that influences design. In the Middle East the sense of form and color is significantly different to Europe. That being said, the sense of form and color is different in every region, though there is a gradual convergence.

3. You have been through several different design roles including product design, manager and now head of your own consultancy. Can you tell us a bit about your career progression and the role you have enjoyed most and why?

My early career was spent working in corporate manufacturing design offices in Australia and Europe. I worked in consultancies in London, Sydney and California. And as a Design Manager in the US at frog and Haworth where I managed their internal design Group in Michigan as well as selecting and managing external design consultant partners in Italy, the US and UK. I was the principal of a design consultancy called Axis in Sydney for ten years and now at my current consultancy (Curedale) for a number of years in Los Angeles.

I prefer designing and managing global projects on a one on one level with managers in companies that are design aware. I prefer projects that apply complex critical thinking and problem solving.

I believe there is a trend towards clients working with organizations like my company. Clive Godwin, Creative Manager of Samsung Europe said “ The large consultancy has had it’s day. Multinational companies tend to look for [designers] as partners who can give one on one service”

Rob Curedale with RTKL and DTank Teams

4. Who have been your biggest inspirations/influences in the over the course of your career?

As a child my father had an interest and library in anthropology and drawing. This led me to study architecture, then Industrial Design and as soon as was able I undertook travels to places like Morocco, Sulawesi, Java, Tibet, Nepal, Egypt, the Solomon Islands, to work on archeological excavations in the Middle East and to study the material culture of these places. I completed the second graduate degree in the area of Industrial Design in Australia at UTS in Sydney. My supervisor was Carl Nielsen a pioneering designer in Sydney who completed UTS’s first Masters degree.

As a student in Australia I admired the work of frog design, Apple and Philippe Starck. I went on to work at frog and with Apple’s internal design where I met Jonathan Ives and was able to collaborate with designers who had worked with Starck and other Iconic designers.

I like the work of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass which I was exposed to through designers who worked in his studio in Milan such as Larry Laske and Nic Bewick. Sottsass’ career spanned the changes that occurred in design since he started a young man working in Mussolini’s Italy all the up until his recent death. Sottsass thought deeply about design and was able to provide intellectual leadership which is rare in our profession. His design was influenced by his global travels particularly time spent in India and an interest in anthropology.

Two Winter Schools that I undertook around ten years ago presented at RMIT in Melbourne by the Domus Academy in Milan influenced my thinking about design. Teachers included some European designers and writers including, John Thakara, Mario Bellini, Ezio Manzini, Clino Castelli, Michele De Lucchi, and Stefano Suzanne, now Chief Creative Director of Philips Design. The TED organization in the Bay area has also exposed me to people I have learned from. Spending time on a one on one basis with these people helped me start to think about important issues. The activities of the IDSA and Design council in the UK and the exhibits, conferences and other activities that they presented also exposed me to many ideas.

The time I spent in Detroit with exposure to the US car industry, and to CCS, Art Center, Cranbrook and Yale helped me think about where design has been and where it should be going.

I admire Yves Behar and Bill Moggridge for what they have achieved changing the nature of design and thinking in the United States. Currently I like the work of Defne Kos, Sam Hecht, Nadav Kander, Herzog & de Meuron, Stuart Haygarth, David Delfin, Michelle Kaufmann, Tord Boontje, Jasper Morrison, Jaime Haydon, Alfredo Haeberli, Satyendra Pakhalé, and Elenberg Fraser.

My inspiration also comes from outside the field of design. I admire Barack Obama and hope that he can achieve some positive changes.

Wall Controls by Curedale Inc.

5. You have also spent time teaching, where do you think that Industrial Design education is headed in the next 10 years?

There is a maturing of design as a profession and a growing of awareness of designers responsibility to the client, user, environment as well as to themselves. Design is diverging from art, as a profession there is a growing awareness of the differences between the two areas. Design is becoming more technical. It is necessary to know more about manufacturing, the environment, culture and behavior. Rigorous research is becoming more important.

I think that there will be a new value placed on learning from indigenous regional historical cultures rather than increasingly soulless international modernism. In terms of style there is a return to surface decoration as was popular in Victorian, and Rococo periods as well as most indigenous cultures. Web 2.0 and Networking will change the nature of many activities and of education. An international perspective and experience will be increasingly valued. Collaboration with business and social science will increase. Continuing education will become a greater part of business life.

6. Design Education and the Design Industry have a direct influence on one another, where do you think the Design Industry is headed in the next 10 years?

Students need to learn how to think critically. Courage and curiosity are attributes of successful design personalities. Design schools need to spend less time teaching model making and drawing and more time helping students learn to create strong solutions to problems. To improve products rather than just make them pretty.

Over the next two decades most Western economies will move into a post-industrial phase. Here in the United States, in Australia and Europe designers will soon no longer be working on commodities such as hair dryers, passenger cars, and consumer electronics. Instead they will be doing front end local cultural research and pre-ideation for teams in Asia. They will be working on alternative technologies, complex research-intensive products such as medical products where critical thinking and problem solving are more important.

Emotional connection is important but it should not be the only purpose of a product because the resources are no longer sustainable. Computers could be designed to be upgrade easily without throwing out the entire product, like changing a camera lens. They could last ten years rather than two years. Many companies admire Apple but lack the courage to do what Apple have done.

7. In previous years you have presented quite a few talks on design and China, How do you think Chinese design will influence Global Design trends in the coming years?

China is now an important manufacturing center. China will grow also as a market. Within 5 to ten years the size of the China domestic market will mean that the greatest economies of scale will be in designing products for that market rather than western markets. This will mean that the qualities of Chinese domestic products will become the qualities of Western products. Some of these qualities contradict the trends of global modernism over the last century. Western consumers will begin to admire Chinese color sense such as their preference for colors like gold, red and primary colors. The Chinese culture is deep so we will begin to learn and admire its many strengths and facets just as we have done with Japanese packaging and animation. We will be influenced by complex surface decoration of China. Mandarin may become the language of business.

I have been asked by Dr Ken Friedman the new Dean at Swinburne to present a design workshop at Swinburne in Melbourne early in 2009 and am discussing workshops with institutions in the US, China and India over the next few months. My interest is in exploring in these workshops design across global cultures.
Dupont’s color research here shows a trend to preference for brighter colors perhaps under the influence of web interaction with Asia, South America and other areas.

8. Design Thinking is a term that is bandied about the business sector at the moment, can you tell us your thoughts on Design Thinking?

Design is about creating something you believe in, about being honest and being equipped to make hard decisions; about strategy as well as creativity. Design is a collaborative cultural activity. I try to tap the creativity and experience of other people as well as relying on my own intuition. I believe that designers are members of the orchestra not the conductors. Industrial design education today concentrates on hand skills like drawing and model making rather than critical thinking skills. There is a demand for graduates in the business design world with thinking skills more than hand skills. This talent pool doesn’t exist. Companies recognize that design can bring something that they need but not most designers but most designers do not have this special quality which Tim Brown and others call “design thinking”.

It is a way of improving things, differentiating things and creating value. Businesses need creativity but with strategy. They need to differentiate to survive. The labor rates in Detroit are $65 per hour. They are $1 per hour in China. Some schools recognize this link between business, collaboration, design thinking, innovation and strategy including Harvard, the D School at Stanford, the Domus Academy in Italy and Carnegie Mellon. One important difference between “design thinking” and what being taught at business schools is the design process which includes gathering information to make an informed decision, ideation, prototyping, feedback then implementation. This is a process that works with global change. This is a way of coming up with new solutions. Business schools are teaching historical insights that are memorized and repeated. We can see the end result of this “business as usual” approach in Detroit. We are living in a world of massive change. We need to learn from history but also need processes that can create new solutions.

Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and James Dyson are examples of business people who got design thinking.

Rob Curedale with Haworth Team

9. There is also a lot of discussion about what business can learn from design, but what do you think design can learn from business?

We need to focus less on ego and more on responsibility. We need to be more rigorous in what we do and work more collaboratively. Our industry is immature. We need to be less focused on fame; on the gang of 20 famous designers and more aware of the real activities of the 200,000 industrial designers who are not published in Wallpaper.

10.  IDEO has been talking about Experience Design or Designing for Experience for the last couple of years, what do you see as the next progression from this way of thinking about design?

Over the last decade many client organizations have moved the emphasis from the product or hardware to the larger client experience. Apple is an example of a company that designs not only the product but the entire retail experience. As well as controlling the intellectual property of the music played by their products and other aspects of the entire customer experience. The product is a vehicle to implement a service and the service or experience is more important to the customer and to Apple than the product. This process will continue for the next few years. The product is becoming smaller and less visible. In the end perhaps the technology will become ambient or invisible and we will be left with a chair and a table where the technology cannot be seen but is accessible in a way consistent with human behaviour in a time before technology existed.

11.  What skill set do you think the next generation of Industrial Designer will require?

Critical thinking and problem solving will become the primary skills of Industrial designers. Rigorous design research skills. A better understanding of ethnography, psychology, and social sciences, engineering, business and marketing.

The need for broader and deeper knowledge may mean that the field of product design education will become more specialized with degrees in management and business oriented design, aesthetic design, design research and specialist fields such as automotive design or toy design. Most consultants will have graduate as well as undergraduate degrees. Design will be more about understanding options and taking responsibility and less about ego and fame.

Education may be undertaken more through web based networks and less through bricks and mortar institutions. Designers who have more and better quality connections will be more visible and to be able to see and take advantage of new opportunities for doing business.

Again, a big thanks to Rob for taking part in our very first Q&A.

Don’t forget that you can keep up with all the future Designer Q&A’s by subscribing for free to the Design Droplet’s RSS Feed.

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November 27, 2008