In just a few short weeks, I will be backpacking through Japan and parts of Korea for 23 days. I’m traveling with a few good friends and hopefully at the end of the trip, we’re still friends.
I am looking to purchase a netbook (ASUS 1005PE or Lenovo S10-3) to use as my blogging machine while I’m on the road so please keep your eye on my site for pictures (if I can figure out how to upload them) and for updates. If worse comes to worst, I’ll use my trusty BlackBerry to update this site.
How important is good design to you? If I could live a 2nd life or if I could do things again, I think I would have considered going into design as a career. Specifically, the type of design I’m referring to is industrial design, human-centric design or product design for the purposes of solving problems, closing the gap in a poor product offering or simply producing something of value for its own sake.
I’m not the most artistic person out there, in fact, I am not artistic at all. But the world of design is very attractive to me. If there was a way that I could fuse design with business/making money while providing solutions to the masses, I would be very satisfied.
One of the top companies in the world in this field is IDEO. It has consistently been ranked as one of the most innovative firms in the world by Business Week magazine. They are experts in both design and business and have worked on some really interested projects over the years, bringing to market some of the most compelling solutions to problems sometimes we never realized we had.
Good design, good user experience and aesthetic appeal makes good business sense especially in the fickle consumer marketplace. In many ways, it helps define the brand. Over the years, unbeknownst to me, design has become very important, but not in isolation. Form and function has to of equal salience. I admire companies like Samsung, Apple, and Porsche for their commitment to both form and function. Contrast these firms with lets say, Bang & Olufsen. It seems to me that they are more about form over function for the purposes of serving a small segment of the market with a large amount of disposable income.
To answer my own question, design is very important and the companies that are able to bring both design and utility in a singular package will end up winning the very limited funds in my wallet.
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