I wish I had invented the wheel

Norman Stevenson and Noel Joyce

In week eleven we had two guest speakers for our class telling us about their careers. The first was Norman Stevenson, a senior design consultant in Design Partners, Bray co. Wicklow. He showed us the studio he works in and the projects he has done. Having seen it I felt very relieved. I have a perpetual fear that as enjoyable as our course can be, we aren’t prepared enough for the real world. I worry that we won’t appeal to employers with our sketches, photoshop or wonky card models. I fear that I’ll be stuck at a desk, fetching coffee, making Solidworks models and nothing else. After seeing Normans work, I felt very relieved. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. He showed us an array of designs at different phases and it looked for all the world like a sophisticated version of our own projects, even the Out of Box Experience method was mentioned, which is one of my favourite projects. He mentioned that he studied in both UL and the NCAD. He said that in Limerick he was considered arty but in Dublin he was the engineer. Again, we find ourselves in design limbo. Like I mentioned in my first blog, there is a fine line between Product Design. Is it Art or Engineering? Who knows? Not even Senior design consultants it would seem. I think it all really depends on yourself, your style and your job. Even his first job as a graduate looked interesting and fun. He asked us to answer the following questions,

What will your responsibilities as a designer be?

As a designer, I am responsible for the aesthetics, for the function, for the form, the light, the dark, the display, the packaging, the features it’s endless. It’s my job to understand how humans interact with a product and why. It’s my responsibility to link the product story, to display it’s features in an easy to use way. With these in mind what one product do you wish you had designed?

I wish I had designed the wheel. Where would we be without it. Nowhere, that’s where, this walking craic takes ages. In the least offensive way possible the next guest speaker definitely wouldn’t be getting anywhere since he’s confined to a wheelchair. Although being carried around on a big platform would probably be mighty.

Noel Joyce is an Industrial Designer, Entrepreneur and currently Head of Design at Hax (www.hax.co) the world's first and largest Hardware Accelerator. He is a specialist in collaborative, multidisciplinary and holistic approaches to new product and business development with emphasis on entrepreneurial and design basis. He advises that we engage in a start up that needs attention all the time in a high pressure environment as it is, in his opinion the best way to learn. If our experience with the Black Box design sprint a few weeks ago and any experience I have from any of the jobs I’ve had is anything to go by, then he’s absolutely right.

(Content.time.com, 2020)