 We will be putting it on the CVI website if if people want to go back to look at it or share it with other people to get to share the information that we'll learn here today. All right, sorry, I'm looking at the chat here. Oh, it's transcribing what I'm, all right, great, so I'm going to start with the land acknowledgement and then I'll introduce our guests and then we'll get right into it. Okay, so as an organization within MSU Denver, oh sorry, as an organization within MSU Denver, CVA acknowledges the indigenous people and the land of Araria and the broader Denver area. We honor and acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. This area was also the site of trade, hunting, gathering and healing for many other native nations. We recognize the indigenous peoples as the original stewards of the land. We respect the many diverse indigenous peoples still connected to this land on which we gather. We also acknowledge the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants who worked the stolen land for the colonists and who continue to disproportionately face economic oppression, racism, violence and exploitation. Currently we want to recognize the communities and families of Araria displaced by the creation of this campus for MSU Denver to have a place that we now call home. We share this acknowledgement to encourage all of us here to consider how our work in this space and our daily lives can address these historic and contemporary atrocities. All right, great. I'm so happy to see everybody here and I'm hoping that I'm getting everybody led in as we go. If I pause, it's because I'm letting somebody into the chat or into the meeting. All right, so welcome to art and work. This is our second installation online because of snow in February of 2023 in Denver, Colorado. We have three industrial designers with us today and I'm going to ask them just quickly to introduce themselves, maybe talk specifically, say your job title and just a brief couple of minutes. Then I'm going to highlight each of them and they're each going to talk about some of the work that they do and then we'll have some time for a little discussion between the panelists and some questions at the end for everybody in attendance. And as a note, I expect my art and action lab students to have some excellent questions. So be prepared. All right, David, why don't you introduce yourself first please? Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm David Klein and I'm a professor of industrial design at MSU Denver. I've been there for a long time. We have a bachelor of science degree in industrial design. Before that, I was teaching at University of Illinois. That's in Champaign, Urbana. That's a really good school for design, a lot of connections with companies in Chicago. And before that, I was a designer at Samsung. We pronounce it Samsung. It's in Korea. So it's a Korean company, Samsung. I think you say Samsung here, consumer electronics. And before that, I designed some toys for a company called Roadmaster. Not real high-end stuff, but some toys and also fitness equipment that was sold at JCPenney. That's a store that I don't know if they exist anymore, I think so, and stuff like that. Then before that, I worked as a model maker. I did architectural models and some product prototypes. And I got my master's degree from Illinois and my bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University a long, long time ago. Awesome. Great. Thanks, David. Eric, I'll have you go next. Great. My name is Eric Heimbach. And currently, I'm an industrial designer here at LCM Classics. This is my office. I graduated from Metro with an industrial design degree in 2017, late 2017. And I'm going to go through kind of my past experience in detail, but I've had everything from working at the reprinting store. I moved to Seattle, worked at Teague, which is a design firm for Boeing as a technical designer. So a little more on the engineering side. And then came back here, worked for MTM Motor Works and did some motorcycle related design work for electric motorcycles. And then I got this job here at LCM Plastics. And I am essentially the lead designer here and the only designer here where I take clients' requests and create designs or make modifications. We also do some in-house design and production here. And behind the wall, there's some big injection loading machines to get the whole factory here as well. So kind of design and manufacturing here in Denver, which is pretty cool for me. Thank you. And Lily. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Lily Cornette. And I saw that question in the chat about the degree. So I just, I graduated from the ID program. It was my professor for Beginning Studio. He helped me get my first internship sketching at a design consultancy in Denver for Hexhead, which was brief, but that helps segue to the job I have currently. I graduated from Metro in 2019. And then that fall, I started working at Thulee as a product designer. I've been there for three and a half years now. And I designed soft goods in Longmont. I work on a team of four. And we are actually a Sweden-based company, so we work in a satellite office where anything that's stoned, any of our bags, luggage, packs, all that of that is designed here in Colorado. And we do a lot of interfacing with our Sweden team, as well as our Asia team. We have developers and factories in Asia. This is my cat. And I'm here in my home office. I work from home about two days a week. And yeah, and I'm super psyched to be here and would like to show you some of my work later. Awesome. Thank you. And we were expecting Enso Kim, who works for Kidrobot, into toy design. Unfortunately, she couldn't make it today, but I will find a way for her to come and share her story with us as well at another time. So yeah, so we're going to dig in. So the run of this will be David will kind of give us an introduction. We'll talk about what he does and then Lily, well, everybody will talk about what they do, but then Lily will wrap us up with what she does, as well as some really good questions that are facing the industry that will bring up some more conversation. So that's the logic behind pacing everybody. And David, I think I'll hand it over to you. Maybe the rest of us can turn. Oh, you're going to share your screen. Never mind. Go ahead. Yeah, I'll share my screen. And I've got a timer here. I'll put it on for 14 minutes. Oh, great. 14 minutes. Yeah. Let's see what we got. Okay. Giving there. I'll go big. So the way this monitor is, I can just see you, Katie, and I'll keep it that way. But let me know if there's any questions you can just chime in and ask me. So that was a good question. Yeah. What's the degree? And I have an MFA that's master of fine art. And my bachelor is actually bachelor of fine art. It's called bachelor of fine art in product design. So that tells you product design is kind of another name for industrial design. So I put it parentheses here and it also has to do with invention. That's why I also put it there. But you'll find industrial design programs within schools of engineering at the MSU Denver. It's in with professional studies with engineering and group like that. So that and it's a bachelor of science. So it's a more technical aspect. Most programs are in art departments. Some of them are in architecture as well. So that was a really good question. Okay. So people ask, oh, what is design? And a lot of people, it's, oh, you design factories or you design industries, right? So it makes sense because interior designer designs interior fashion designs fashion and so on. So industrial design must design industries, right? Nope. That's not what we design. But it's close. And there is some reason for industrial in the title because all of the objects, and I put this sideways just to fit more, are designed, are produced in the factory. So they're designed at the table or in the shop and we figure out how to make things and we use the computer. But vacuum cleaner, guitar, automobile, chairs, lighting, medical equipment and toys. Nowadays, almost everything you buy is mass produced in the factory somewhere, right? So we're really a long way from handcraft. So on the left is a image of someone making ceramics. Maybe some of you have that clay in a thrill. Therapeutic and really like your hands are really dictating the shape of that. And that's how things were made for a long time. And now on the right, we have 3D printing of ceramic. And it's a similar material. It's going through a nozzle there and kind of add it up. And now you can kind of see those little texture on there. You can do a little more complexity with it, with machines maybe. There's some capabilities that the hands are not able to do. So we as designers, we have to understand so many different kinds of fabrication techniques. And not to fully understand the detail. So like upper left is extrusion and a bottom left is plastic injection molding. You see those plastic forks and that's how things are made. We have to understand how parts can be made in these different processes in a general way. Then we consult with an engineer who knows this stuff a lot better than us. So don't be intimidated that you have to be a materials expert. We have a couple of classes in this and you just need to know good enough. Another thing design is, design is how it works. So a lot of people think that design is just how something looks. They're designer jeans or designer, whatever, it's just how it looks. But as you get into products, it's also about how it works. And how it works, how it operates, how it works within the business, how it works within society, and that term design without saying industrial. Industrial design is designed for fabrication. But design could be graphic, product, and business like that, right? So this is a really good book actually I recommend. You could probably find it pretty cheap. It's a few years old now, but it profiles some companies and a few of the projects that are in there. And I love this because it's such a different things that industrial designers work on. So headphones, that's the wider group. There's consumer electronics, so Bluetooth speaker, headphones, things like that. Kitchen appliances, so it can be like a toaster, toaster oven, blender. This is a potato peeler, it has a big handle on it. And then we have automobile. Automobile is kind of a special thing that's called transportation designers design that, so you go to special school. But they also employ industrial designers. It's a team effort. Industrial designers will work on the interior and some of the details, right? And the transportation designer design the whole thing. So this gives you idea of the realm, the range of things industrial designers work on. And there's a wide range of things I can show just products all day, grab them around me and show you. But what do they have in common? And I don't know if they can we have participation? Can anybody answer? It's quite diverse things, but and there's three or four things or four things, maybe all products have in common for industrial design. And what do you guys think? Feel free to either use the chat or your microphone. They're all electrical, game says. Oh, electrical, yeah, a lot of them do, but I'll move through. But one thing that I mentioned, they're all mass produced. So no one sits and makes a watch anymore or a light or a drill, right? So they're all mass produced and I already said that, I guess. But so we do understand these ways of making things and not just plastic. In fact, we really, I would say nowadays, we really need to reduce the plastic. It's going to the garbage and the ocean and everywhere. But it's amazing material that can do a lot of things. And so it's going to be continued to use be used. But slip casting, this is really nice ceramic piece. And you see the mold on the top right. So this one, somebody makes it out of plaster and the mold is out of plaster. And then it's glazed and it's a ceramic object, but it's made over and over. So this is kind of that handcraft that goes to industrial. This is forging. So a piece of metal goes in. You might recognize this as like a bicycle crank that goes in a bicycle, but it comes out of here and this is called flash. There's extra metal and then that's trimmed off. So there's a lot of work behind the parts that you see that are made in factories. Another thing is they're all used by people. So almost every design, you sit in it or you use it or you hold it. So we study people. That's the field of ergonomics. Ergonomics is the measure of people. So Henry Dreyfus and some others through history and the people continue to do it. They measure people doing all different things, standing and sitting, talking on the phone, driving a forklift and they figure out all that. So there's a little bit of science and you write down the numbers. Ergonomics is the measure of people. And then human factors is, oh, could you understand things that you see? So like your apps and vision and things like that. So a part of this is also observational research. So in order to design something, you might not know about it really yourself. So you have to go and watch people using it. If it's a lawnmower or snowblower or a chair or any of the simplest thing, this is a blow dryer. So this is a design project I found. And if you look on the left, the designer went around to hair salons and see how they hold it. So how do they use the handle? And they wonder how they use the handle. And look at the hands, no one's using the handle. So the design's gonna be different because of observational research. And on the right, there's a lot of foam mock-ups, just any shape and figuring out which one's best. And this is the one they kind of ended with. Basically it's one big handle, right? It's kind of curved shape, so I just hold it. And that's a good example of observational research applied to design. This is another project that the designers looked at some people in the wheelchairs. So there was a lady that came to us, she was in a wheelchair, and she's in a group of wheelchair people. And they want some protection from the rain and snow. So these are the products that are out there now. And don't they seem kind of dangerous? So they ask a lot of people in the wheelchair, how do you move your hand? What do you like? What do you don't like? Do you want to be able to store it away? And then they made some little mock-ups like this, that if you can tell the pink one kind of folds up like accordion, and the other one folds back. And they make some little models like this and test them. Another thing, designs have in common, they're all functional, and they do something. We can say they solve a problem. Okay, the problem of peeling a potato, the problem of sitting, and all of that, right? And it might not be an incredible problem, like huge, but it's a small problem. So that's differentiates it from art, in a sense, right? That's a kind of more functional driven. So these are tools for the kitchen, potato pillar. They have bigger handles, slicing bread. Another thing about them is they all look cool, they all look good. A longer word than cool is like aesthetic, right? So we can say, they're aesthetically refined. And this is where design has a lot of crossover with art. So that concern of color, sewing machine on the bottom right, or any of these really can be considered a sculpture in a way. The top right is an ergonomic bicycle handle. So if you can imagine when you're on that bike handle, it's really on the meat of your hand. And then mountain biking, you kind of grab it from the side sometimes. So then it really grips good there. But also it looks really cool and like a sculpture, right? So sculpture, color, surface texture, negative space, and all of that stuff. So that's why you get a degree in art. So you can do this kind of really fast when you're developing your designs along with research. Another important aspect is something new, right? There's no reason to design just another chair. We have so many chairs. So what's the reason of the next chair? It has a cup holder. It has a good back support. It has wheels on it or whatever. And that's innovation. So the chair has already been invented. The light has already been invented. But if I put a handle on it, that's innovation. Or if I have a new kind of blow dryer, I mean, that's actually an innovation because it's a total. Have you guys used the Dyson blow dryer? I remember when that came out and it's just totally different. So we have innovation and invention. This is a new kind of chair I found online. I thought it's pretty cool. You know what this is for? Special use? I guess it kind of shows there. I'll go up to the next slide. It's for elderly people or anyone. You might not think about it, but they have trouble getting in and out of a chair. So they actually make chairs with motors in them that kind of lift up like the motor to get the person out. But if you look at this, he puts his hand on the handle there and it kind of leaned forward and then he can get out of the chair. I thought it's pretty cool. It has a friendly look to it and it's kind of nice. So in design, we use creative process and it's not really in a line like this. It goes across, but it can go in a circle and keep going. But you have some idea and research. Then you do some sketches and drawings. We'll probably see those from the designers and I'll show you a few. Then we have more refined drawings and we have models and prototypes. And then we go to manufacture. That's kind of like the process. So drawing is really with pen and pencil. So a lot of my students and a lot of professional designers, they're literally using just like a big ballpoint pen and designing furniture or pots and pans, shoes like this, really good. Then you're going into computer with illustrator or other things to do like color and apply like that. This one is some drawings and then the middle, these two are like foam models. They're just made out of blue foam with some lines drawn on them. So I can just make them really easy and kind of see if I like to hold them in my hand. Then I can go back and draw them and render and make more precise drawings. So this is technical drawing for like an iPhone. It's an older iPhone. So there's a section view and every aspect is measured and a given dimension. This is what's called an exploded view. Assembly view, it's also called that. And if you can see on the bottom, it's a sport sunglasses. And on the top there, the pieces, how they go together, right? So the designer figures this out. It makes a real simple drawing. This is a lemon juicer. And on the left, it's the side view. And then if you imagine, if you cut it down the half, it's on the middle with a laser beam. This is a section view, so it's looking through the inside so you kind of see the shape of it. Designer has to think about that. This is an innovative toaster I thought was cool that instead of the toaster going down, it goes through like this. So this designer made a model, maybe it's a 3D print. It's not real. And then this drawing to kind of show what the pieces are. There's a heater in there and a little motor and the elements of the design, right? So we're using any kind of way, even just tape and cardboard to make a full model to see how things look. Then we take that data and go into the computer and render things like a little bit better. But we always want to have like a hands-on thing. So it's hard to design a potato peeler or really anything on the computer. So this is like the old potato peeler and coming to the new one. So each one's iteration that's called iteration one after the other. And you ask people to try it and you see what's better. Here's where the crutch. So on the far left is the original one and on the far right, it's lighter. It's able to adjust and maybe it looks cooler or not. I don't know if anybody really cares what the crutch looks like, but these are iterations showing the development, right? So there's this process of building in the lab. Then you make the computer model in the right color. So you don't go right to this. You always work before. And this applies to soft goods. Literally it'll show some. And this is another student that designed really nice pack with patterns on there. I'll finish with my projects real quickly. I did some research about eating habits and the breakfast emerged as a really important meal, but a lot of breakfast cereals have so much sugar. So I thought I'm gonna make a granola maker. And I made this machine. It's like a bread maker, but it makes it granola. And this is the first one I made. Then I hired a designer who does really good computer models. And he made an updated version like this. Looks really cool. And this is an exploded view showing each of the components. So I use this drawing and I wrote a description. And I went and got a patent through the US patent office. So that's in the process. It has a temporary patent now. And now I have to make the model. And this is a project I'm working on now. Okay. Awesome. That's my time. Thanks, David. So whirlwind, what is industrial design? I never think they have a really good sense now. Thank you. Wonderful. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to Eric then. All right. I guess. So I'll start off with just the beginning of my education, I guess in college. I started off not really knowing what I wanted to do. Went to a CSU actually and kind of tried every class that interests me. Nothing really stuck. So kind of last minute I transferred to MSU Denver and really liked the beginning classes with the hands-on work. We had a metals class. We had a woods class. So I made a bike stand like working my mountain bike with. I made a coffee table. So no, I figured I found kind of my passion right away with the design program. So I was kind of fortunate in that sense. And so once I figured that out, I just kind of went straight ahead and dove into it. I got a internship at Five Horizons which is a textile soft goods company. Just really, really short internship but I got to see what the textile and soft goods industry looked like. And at least in that job, a lot of it was you come up with sketches and you put a Photoshop board together of an idea like we were doing stuff for Carhart and they needed stuff to throw in for free when you bought like a bigger purchase. So one was kind of like a water bottle holder and stuff like that. And then we just sent them off to China those sketches and they would make it really cheaply and quickly for us. So I think a lot of Lily will elaborate on their process but at least at that firm, that's kind of the work process and you just kind of had to turn over things pretty quickly. Then I got an internship at the 3D printing store and that was a really good experience because I kind of found that I really like working in CAD and computer design and that's kind of where I excelled. So I got an internship there doing a prosthetic design for animals and it was called Plostedicts, pretty clever name. So as you can see this is my, okay, so go to Plostedicts. So a first project here, so I'm just gonna go through these projects. Jezelle was this dog right here and she needed a rear leg essentially. So what they were doing is we would take a, we would wrap their legs with a cast and this dotted kind of triangle structure is a 3D scan. So I would take, we would take the cast 3D scan it and then bring it into the CAD software and then work off that and make a design and then test it. And really it was just all 3D printing, you know, really quick prototypes to figure out what worked and what didn't. And so you can see all of these different prototypes and ideas we went through and some industrial designers are really heavy with sketching and sketching up ideas. And so personally I'm not and this, you know, I just throw a really rough sketch together took two minutes to throw this idea together with a BOA design and then I go into CAD really quickly and basically print things and get in my hands and see what works and doesn't and just kind of repeat that process. So this is kind of the final design and I got BOA to donate some BOA straps and integrate that design and the problem was the legs kept sliding off of their fur was really hard to clamp down on that. So before they're using Velcro straps and so we went with BOA and seemed to be pretty successful at least the first go around there's still this need to be iterated on but this was really good experience and it looked, you know, everyone's interested in this. Everyone likes dogs and the help me get my next job, which was and here's they have like a whole Facebook page to want to show you guys. So it's kind of fun. I did this leg for Walter and that was with the strap. So Dazelle was the later design. So after that, I leveraged my connection. My uncle worked at Boeing at the time and he knew a guy at Teague and Teague is Boeing's design firm. So up in Everett where they manufacture the 747s which I guess they don't do anymore. They just finished the production run but this is right outside their campus in Everett, Washington and this was a crazy, you know, change of scenery for me and it was a job as a technical designer. Technical designer it's more, so they really liked my CAD work. I was decent at CAD out of college. So got the job as an intern and then that lasted for six months and they hired me full time. And that job was really working with, I think a team of 12 of us and then you break off into smaller teams like this project here is the 777X interior mock-up. This was a team of six and everyone was kind of split up. So they had this airplane and they needed this traveling mock-up to go to trade shows around the world and basically sell their new interior design and show off the lighting, how the bins work, the space. So people could, you know, who are potentially buying these airplanes if they walk through it. So everything got to work just the way it does on a real airplane just had to be super cheap to manufacture and had to be transportable. So I can't show any of the details of the CAD work but this is one example. These are bent panel holders. So right by your feet on the wall of the airplane there's these vents that have the air conditioning and whatnot and I had to get them three printed. So we make them out of EPS foam. We have this big wire cutter and that's what this white is is EPS foam and then just plywood and they had a cool strategy of bolting these together so they fit right every time. So then you can send it to the shop with the drawing and they have all the information they need and they can assemble and build it really quickly. And because it was a traveling mockup I had to, you had to take parts off and be able to transport it safely without breaking. And you can imagine these vents you can kind of see down here in the left corner. It was a three print so I had all these really fragile slats in it. So I made it a way where you had to have it face down and then this cut out here is where the only place you can put your hand to pick it up so you're not accidentally grabbing the printed area. So cool little things that you had to consider with these projects and this is kind of every couple of months or month we had a new project that was completely different making these panels or making brackets to hold LED strips that project light over the ceilings and whatnot. So, and this is kind of the final version of that. So that job lasted only a year actually and then Belling had their problems with their airplanes, I'm sure everyone's heard of and the max planes and so budgets got cut and I didn't continue working there. So I came back to Denver and I don't know there's many industrial designers here that have been in the school a while but Mike Mayberry was the professor of ours me and Lily's actually. And I knew he had connections here. So really me getting all these jobs is just leveraging connections and then kind of working hard through them. So this was a project, my senior project. These are some sketches for my senior year and Mike was interested in bike design and so that's kind of what got me to meet with him a few times. So he was someone in the industry who had connections that I was trying to build. So essentially as an industrial designer it's hard to get a job because you can't you don't have enough experience and it's hard to get experience to have a job. So basically what I did after that year at Teague is I was fortunate enough to live at home so I didn't have to worry about rent and I built my own experience. So I was interested in bike design. So this is in my garage I cut some pieces of foam together worked on a folding electric bike and this is elaborating on my senior project. So just working through and all my design was in SOLIDWORKS which was a program for 3D modeling and then there's some key shot renderings of the more final product. So kind of what I learned is to really simplify everything. It's easy to as industrial designers I was not always but people do tend to complicate things with their ideas but if you really want to make something that has to be pared down is the basic version of it especially if you're doing large manufacturing so simplifying. So this job got me, this project got me the next job with Mike and he had a packed motorcycle that he needed a kickstand for. So, and he had to make seven of them this is a really custom bike which was, this was like a dream project and I was really excited to do this but I had so much to learn I didn't know how to get the angle right for the kickstand and all that so this really just put it in the hours on my own and just testing things out of foam and then finally getting the CAD so this is the motorcycle rear wheel figuring out where we want their kickstand how we're gonna make it how we're gonna produce multiples of them to make it not ridiculously expensive because even machining and I actually have one of the legs right here so this is a machined aluminum piece and this is the leg of the kickstand so these are a couple hundred dollars a piece but if you simplify it so there's only a couple operations in the CNC machining where it goes around it cuts the cost down so that was a consideration of this project and really every project. So yeah, doing that three prints testing the springs getting a foot design and we ended up 3D printing the foot and this blue area is continuous strands of carbon fiber so that was actually stiff enough to support the motorcycle with a 3D print another cost cutting and kind of interesting take on a kickstand because the shape right here to machine this is hours and hours and you have to have a really skilled person to make a good one and then to repeat that it's really expensive this is probably 10 bucks of material to 3D print it so I had to make a drawing for it we also make jakes for the person who's gonna actually manufacture and install the kickstand two minutes, okay so anyway, this is a cool project I really enjoyed it this is the last project I did with Mike and we designed a motorcycle body kit so this is a Suron motorcycle it's a little electric dirt bike weighs like 100 pounds and the biggest issue it had was we identified a problem with it and the seat wasn't really big enough to ride it like a dirt bike you have to shift your weight forwards and backwards and dirt bike all the time so we took a seat off another dirt bike put it on it and realized oh, okay, this is almost the right size let's see what we can do with this maybe we can 3D print something here's some sketches and ideas working through again, so my experience of 3D scanning worked with this project now we 3D scan the whole motorcycle the skeleton of it and after we scan the motorcycle seat you kind of put it together in CAD now you get some 3D prints we did the first ideas at the 3D print body kit and it worked and we wrote and tested it didn't like the design had some issues so we redid the design taped up the bike see what we liked and then this is where we ended up with this design here and switched to this so it's form foundry you guys can go visit the website formfoundry.com kind of running short on time but made a body kit and to make it affordable for people it had to be injection molded because you had to basically increase the volume of production so here's a body kit right here so not enough time to go into details but the seat comes off it pivots up and these are all injection molded parts so there's really no other way to make a durable part for a motorcycle that we sold these for $470 besides injection molding but the issue is the upfront cost you have to make these massive tools and the tooling which is these big steel pieces for injection molding this is almost over $100,000 of investment required to make all these parts these are really big parts either piece of steel that sticks off a couple feet beyond this in all directions and so they actually went in the mold like this so they pop out like that this polypropylene so it's super flexible these things won't shatter tons of consideration here but the guy who helped connect us to this project or helped us manufacture these is Darrell Altium Plastics and once we're done with this project I started working here at Altium Plastics with Darrell so all my jobs are kind of just connection to connection to connection yeah so I'll let the lead go sorry thank you Katie I'm here on mute there we go I just think that's great to hear how you get the jobs right I mean I think that's something important that young people need to know as they're entering a field right that's how it all comes together thank you Eric fantastic alright Lily let's hand it to you when would you like to do Q&A I'm saying at the oh golly yeah well I was gonna do it after you we'll see you first time okay let's give this a go alright I'm going through there and let me start okay can you all see my screen okay my name is Lily Pena as you know I graduated from National in 2019 I actually did not entirely land at product designer as right off high school I lived out of a van and I converted it you know it was a small van and that kind of taught me that I wanted to work with my hands and also I started getting into more woodworking I was a route setter at climbing gyms so I worked a lot with my hands and I kind of let along to this path where I ended up being a product designer so also to your high school students I will say like maybe college is not immediate for you and that's okay that's one thing that I wish I had embraced earlier was like sometimes you're not ready and that's I think totally fine and maybe you need time to figure out where you want to go so I've been actually group from 2019 to present I'm focused on soft goods design so that's stone products and then in my free time I like to climb backpack and skiing really quick I'm just going to talk about what it's like what my project phase is as a soft goods designer quick run through a couple of my most earliest projects I can't show my recent projects because they're not on the market yet so I'll be focused on some of my first projects and then a little bit of reflection of some questions to think about as you're considering going into the design space or whether you're considering going into the art space as well as the outdoor industry so as I stated earlier I worked for a 2-lea group which also owns the brand Case Logic we have two brands that design different product categories right now I'm going to be focused mainly on some 2-lea products so I'll talk a little bit about that we are a very large company international based out of Sweden but we have satellite offices around the world we have sport and cargo carriers you've seen those car top boxes we also do rooftop pins packs bags and luggage that's where I'm focused we also do active juvenile events like that and we're also coming out with a line of pet products soon as well we have RV products as well I've designed a couple things for different sport and cargo accessories the same for the children's product category but mainly I'm focused on packs bags and luggage so really a large product category and the premise for 2-lea is to bring your life so wherever you're going we try to create products that help you bring your life whether it's going mountain biking or running or traveling surfing all of these things we try to support that so how do we get to a bag and come up with an idea and how do we get that to market how do we develop ideas and sell it all over the world well I'm going to talk a little bit about what it comes down to to create these products depending on what the design portion of the team does we have a lot of different teams that bring these products to market so we have kind of a product management team and they kind of wear the in-house consultants for them and they come up with an idea and they say hey we're going to bring these we're going to create a new bag collection to bring it to the market here's your user group and they do these portfolio planning what their product assortment is going to be a week course and once we start working through the design and we finalize it as a team we come up with a specification pack send it to the factory and then we start getting samples and we go into a development process and eventually we get to production so this will be the this will look boring but it's actually really important I come back to it over and over again this is literally what we're doing the five wise we'll get started we'll get handed off the design brief and the design brief essentially is the basic starting block for a project I picked one of these pages to show because this is the one that I tend to go back to over and over again so this essentially shows the elevator pitch why are we bringing this product to market what are our goals do we want to capture a market group of users what type of bags are you making was it a bigger bag or smaller bag how many skews are you doing different colors how many units am I going to sell does that mean that I can put unicorn leather on it or not so it just it helps determine what is within the scope of capability and then also what's really important is our target cost Dave was mentioning manufacturing we have to be able to meet a certain target cost because we have a profit margin in mind really just realistically of how do you get it to market and these are all the answers that are on the project design brief so as soon as I get that I start diving into research and research can be is something that I do ongoing we do it as a team so I'll look at stuff online I'll use Pinterest I will read I'll look at TikTok I'll look at Instagram for those of you that feel like you're wasting time it's actually good to see what the world's what's going on in the world look at consumer trends I gather inspiration so trying to do a little bit of understanding different brands will create user personas we'll also look at like larger scale trends like as you know during the pandemic we had a lot of changes and we had a lot of burnout from millennials I'm an aging millennial so I was experiencing burnout was happening around the world actually so we were seeing that there are shifting priorities within this larger generational group and we kind of focused on the shift to health and wellness rising out of the pandemic all of these things kind of help build a case of what the product should be and once I kind of get an idea of what direction we're going in I start to brainstorm so this is a bunch of iterative sketching thinking about the form of the bag thinking about where you want the panel breaks to be the interaction the style of the bag so just really getting out all of these rough concepts quite often what I'll do is I'll start these concepts on a table and so I work with a team of four there are Anna Ryan Chris and myself and we do all of the bag design here and we have these team meetings so we start thinking about all the user interface and really basically like who's the user group kind of giving each other critique on these ideas so we'll do rapid iteration as a team we'll test the fit of samples we got in so really just kind of using each other as a sounding board and collaborating and getting a gut check all of these things are much more informal before we take it to the larger project team and present it in a much more formal way which leads me to the design reviews so once we kind of get alright I have this collection of styles I'm thinking of I will typically gather them into constant families based off of a certain style so if I have two backpacks two laptop bags maybe a cross body sling I'll say here's what it'll look like with style A here's what it'll look like with style B I'll start hinting at you know some of the material instructions how does the bag open up where do you put your phone where do you put your laptop things like that and then I just open it up for discussion and we talk about it a team of what we want to keep what we want to throw out and what we want to tweak and I'll go back to the drawing board and start to do more sketching and start to develop these concepts during this time I will also start figuring out what are the materials that we want to use obviously I go back to that design brief what are target costs can I use really expensive premium material maybe not who's the user group does this need to be light and fast is it for hiking does it need to be a lightweight fabric does it need to be water resistant do we want to try and put more sustainable materials you know we'll talk about that later as far as like finding that balance with what you can how you can impact the industry so can we pitch a recycle product to the team and make a case for that so these are all the things that go into the materials and near the end of the design process I go into what's called I guess I would call it the final design review it's where I've got my concepts fully refined one of those things you'll do is all kind of start this will be on illustrator I'll do sketches I'll start I start sketching by hand but then I go into the digital sphere and I do some quick rendering these things look very might look a little bit more refined but typically we have these processes to go very quickly as far as applying shadow and shade and I'll go through this so that I can focus on really working out those small features where the panels intersect etc so I'm starting to say okay where's the logo going to be it's going to be reflective silver what are the key feature sets what are the final dimensions I also will create any CAD work so you can see here I'm going to have this is a hard-molded safe zone so I'll start making the models and solid works and then as well as applying creating these full-scale orthographic so these are actually in full-scale and we'll send those off to the factory another thing I do is I pitch color so another thing that's really important and also exciting about working in soft goods is you're always trying to understand what's going on in the trends and how consumer mindsets are changing so it just comes down to observing day to day seeing what people are doing what they're wearing and we'll use these mood boards to kind of create a case of why we want to use certain colors and then I'll mock it up in a backpack to give over a sketch to give the project team an idea of what it might look like in person now we've approved the project we've approved the design we're ready to go to the factory and you can't just share a sketch with them and accept them to understand it I'm usually sending this over to a factory in Asia there's a language barrier so and there's also the way that they produce the materials there is completely different than just being theoretical this is kind of like where the rubber heats the road so it'll be the final concept I'll have an overview of the main features all the dimensions material call out pocketing any specific special types of construction that I need to be taken in consideration all the labels logos and then I'll also send off any CAD models as well as the full scale artwork and I'll just go back and forth and get samples from the factory I think something that's really important and Eric was talking about this too is just being really iterated so focusing on those smaller details we actually have an in-house sample room so we have people that will sew up bags for us so we will have them sew up maybe small details and compare them to see what works best so it's really about focusing on the details as they say like there's a schemes quote I believe the details are the details they make the design it's really just paying attention to the little things that goes a long way and another thing that's really important is out of like at these samples so if you can imagine I send off my step path the factory processes they create patterns from scratch and I get back my bags one month later it's very exciting but then I find out my laptop doesn't fit I made the pocket too small these handles are too short all types of things the stitching is tearing here so what I'll do is I'll create a red line file which has each change listed one per slide and make it very clear to the factory what I want them to change and you can imagine that somebody is there there's a translator who's translating these into a different language so that the pattern maker can apply these changes so really being clear and understanding who you're communicating to is important got it now I'm just going to dive into a couple of the projects that I did closer to the beginning of my time I do this really fun custom pack for one of our to the athletes it's a ski pack that has his crampons and has added straps for his skis I thought this was really interesting because this guy skis off of clips and then he pulls a parachute so he's a base jumping skier I know well I can't wrap my around it but it's pretty wild so if you ever look at the video even see him be off a clip and pull a parachute my tears to our then then the next one it's to leave this those these are just some more heritage style simple backpacks we sell about 50,000 of these units per year so it has a larger reach all over the world and then case logic be so this is the first collection I worked on as a designer I wish I could have brought my models my samples to show just the progression between the first samples to the finals samples but this is kind of our camera bag collection for case logic and then to the accent I showed some examples of this and this is just our largest business oriented bag collection at Julie and I just wanted to open up this space and we do the Q&A of just thinking about whether you want to go on to art whether you go into commercial one of the things that you think about is what's really exciting is if you're mass producing you're reaching a lot of users so that's one thing that can be really fun as you're reaching a lot of people but then again you know everything I design comes from petroleum so you have to think about the environmental impact and really if you can implement lasting change with what you're doing as well as like you will see that you have manufacturing limitations you want to do something that's really changing but you have very limited factory costs and then also social responsibility of thinking about how you can affect change if we're continuing to produce products that are going to end up in a landfill so I really like this quote from a book I was reading recently what do you love, what are you good at what is the world need and what can you be paid for because at the end of the day you do need to be able to live I love to sleep Yeah exactly and then the last thing I wanted to talk about is just considering to think about the sphere that you're entering we have a huge gap in gender diversity and just diversity in general in design only 19% of practicing industrial designers are women but as you know women influence 90% of purchasing decisions half of our users are women so we have a line of products that are designed for women but not by women so I really do think we need more women in design and then another thing is in the outdoor industry it's also not proportionate to our actual population and it has to do with access it has to do with regional like if you can get out of the city there's a huge barriers to access so thinking about who are your participants and I'm kind of rushing this I want to give you just a moment to talk about this so I think I just had some reflections that I've had in the year in review and I would say for anybody that's going into design is to be an ally to say something one thing I've learned is like finding your people considering culture fit so think about who you want to work with that's really important think about working with your friends people that understand you that respect you and then continuing to grow and learn about these disparities and how we can create a more inclusive environment within design and also within the outdoor industry yeah that's most of the talk I think it is really important in these industries to really think about who's actually participating in them and who's invited or allowed in and hopefully we are helping to bring more people to more industries as part of our goal here I think that's really important to talk about alright so we have a couple of minutes left and I would love to have some great questions um would you at the top you can see you can raise your hand if you have a question um so awesome go ahead Elliot and then Lucero you'll be next I just had a question about when you were in college or when you were starting out with your career if you had any things that you wanted to push other people to do that you wish you would have done that's a good question starting on our career like what would you if you were giving advice to your younger self kind of right Elliot I would say maybe spend time figuring out what you really want to do not being necessarily pressured to do something I think maybe giving yourself space to take elective classes too um I really enjoyed taking art classes when I was at metro printmaking um it took me a while to find design so definitely and visualizing right because this is what you're going to be doing every day for hours so you have to find something that you like so I think spend time figuring that out don't don't just rush into it cool yeah I totally agree with Lily um I think another thing that I would tell my younger self is kind of ask more questions the people who are older than me or ahead of me in the programs I'm in or in the industries I'm interested in and just try to you know get involved in those you know really just try out a bunch of different things and see what you like because I think at least for me college was all about figuring that out was what I'm good at what I'm interested in um and I think once you find a passion others then it's everything kind of becomes easier because you like doing the design work or you like doing you know X and uh you'll put more time into it and you know it's especially industrial design it's really competitive industries so you want to be in this in this industry and I think a lot of industries at a high level then you got to be better than most and that's kind of the reality uh so um for industrial design yeah figure out what other students are doing go to conferences just really get involved and uh yeah get involved and say yeah I would say I would echo those and also for myself um because um college is limited time it was four years and um I would say I wish I would have maybe just a focus more really concentrated I mean you do have to have some fun but um also it's a kind of short time so um yeah just to really learn to focus and kind of uh use that time really um concentrated you know on your efforts awesome thank you guys thanks Elliott uh Lucero what was your question if she's still here all right here on mute oh Lucero you're on mute yes oh your mic isn't working all right do you want to type it and I can read the question out great did everyone have a snow day did everyone have to go to school or was it canceled we had school uh I was hoping for a snow day but it never came so I went down there all right this question is for Lily I was wondering how you've incorporated sustainable design in your work yeah that's a great question and it's how one you have to grapple with because it's not like you go up and everyone shows up and say hey we're we're trying to do this as a team sometimes you have to push for it or advocate within your personal team uh how we've done it um one of the ways is doing a lot of research to build buy in your product teams is to like hey we need to do these recycled fabrics I've done some research here's a great recycled fabric that we can use so building a case for that and doing your own homework and pitching that to the product team and also like planting little seeds like I in my mind if I could do it would be completely recycled but the budget might be limited and you might only be able to get one um component to be sustainable and that's when you maybe do that for this project but the next time they're open to doing more another thing you can look at is the factories are they blue sign certified so there's third party certifications that say like this factory actually treats their workers right and they've also limited their use of water and they're not producing or they're minimizing their production of toxic chemicals right so it's constantly just you kind of have to I'm just giving you some very like specific examples but you kind of I would say continue to educate yourself and think about what's the next step that I can get my team to go to because you can't get from A to Z so sometimes you gotta like win small battles progressively um and just learning what's really sustainable there's a lot of greenwashing out there and really doing your homework of saying like this is post industrial post consumer um I could go on but I would say self education sharing that news and continuing to to push for those items great question I was going to answer a question that was earlier I saw in the chat about how much is a patent and I really said a lot it is a lot I worked with a couple patent things and for like an invention you might have like a phone stand or something you want to patent it um the full patent can be between five thousand and eight thousand dollars and a lot of that is paying a lawyer to basically fill out the forms so if you can kind of find someone who's smart like a lawyer and they can fill out a lot of forms um and they could pay less but the um initial patent it's called a provisional patent the last one year that's only around seventy dollars to get so you get that first then you work on it then after one year if you think it's a really good idea um five or eight thousand uh something like that anyway for my experience are they worth it all the time if I can show them on that we we for the the moto kit for the motorcycle we talked about doing that and um really like in this current at least in this plastic industry it's so easy to replicate things and change one little thing the holes the square now or something and they can get past it so a lot of it now is just time to market so as soon as we said we're doing this design it's full speed ahead get it on the market before everyone else and then you know that's your advantage because in China too when you're when your tools and designs are there people you know it's a it's another company or there's outsourcing the work to another company there and people can steal designs you see like Oakley knockoffs and all that stuff so yeah yeah for this industry it's a lot of just time to market no one even bothers with the money for a pattern yeah and it's a small and one small thing on that and then I wanted to hear Asia's question but a lot of times you do non-disclosure so like a factory could agree not to share your work or you do non-disclosure like I can't show you stuff because it's non-disclosure Eric couldn't show stuff for Boeing because of non-disclosure so sometimes they're legally finding items but and then there's also I mean we can talk about patents another time there's not much about it but yeah that's that's another thing to consider awesome great thank you yeah Asia what's your question can you hear me yeah okay so this like designing a product it sounds like there's like a lot of like skills you need like marketing design itself like maybe like engineering so what classes do you take to like like for the major to like design these products or does like everybody in the team who are making the product do they all have like different skill sets yeah it I think it depends on the scale that you work at Eric is in a smaller company so he probably does a different variety of special I'll let Eric answer that part but like where I am I only do design work so I don't do any marketing photography I don't do any development I will just say like hey I like this you know a swatch can you find this for me and then there's a developer that goes to a sourcing team so we have a sourcing team that finds stuff we have a sourcing team that negotiates pricing with a factory so it just depends on how big your team is if you're just doing design but I think taking classes can help if you want to do an engineering focus you know you want to work with injection molded parts you can take you can do a minor in mechanical engineering those often go hand in hand and you can look into that if you want to do something more in the art space maybe you take more art classes and product design classes so always exploring your interests but I think the really the biggest thing for design I would say is your design process and building that process like how do you get a problem and how do you solve it building a lot of user because you're not going to be designing for yourself you're going to be designing for somebody else in a totally different position so I think it's just like how to put yourself in someone's shoes and think about what they really need yeah I think a piece of advice I have you know I think school kind of shows you the tools and gives you an intro but to be a professional at anything it's a lot of work on your own but if I was trying to figure out what classes to take I'd find interested in car design so and I did this when I was in school I messaged some people on LinkedIn he worked at car companies and said what's CAD software to use or you know I think reaching out to professionals and getting what they actually use day to day or skills that's valuable to them then you can kind of apply that for form foundry I had to do literally everything myself I created the website I did the marketing did the graphics design and that was all just you know YouTube education and a lot of trial and error and time so you can pretty much learn anything with the internet we just got to do it yeah what I'd say about that is like design is your main thing so you're skilled with drawing and creativity and that but to know enough to talk to people from the other department so you're not like alien them so I'm only an artist and I only talk about this you should be able to be friendly and communicate with the business person and with the people in the factory and the marketing team and all that like to be a team player just to know a little like you would expect them to know a little more about the marketing and the marketing department and I saw a question is it difficult to break into the answers definitely yes and Lily I'm not sure how many people from our program work professionally but it's probably less than half of people who graduate with us as an industrial designer I guess to be frank I will say for Metro the strength of Metro is there's a lot of machines and really cool tools and really if you want to just get in there and start making stuff there's so many resources at your disposal but one thing that Metro left not Metro State but the ID program is connections to design groups in major companies and I see other schools that have a really good co-op program or things like that and like Eric was saying leveraging connections 80% of jobs were found through networking so I think a lot of that is just you might have to market yourself and put yourself out there and just think about those things before you go to school too yeah absolutely you need the skills to do the work but then you also need the connections to be able to get the jobs absolutely great well thank you so much and I appreciate you're staying a little longer everybody so great questions and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about it with the interns going forward but I really appreciate your talking about what you do thank you absolutely this was a pleasure my pleasure good questions you guys yeah there's any more questions you know email you can email one of us to forward it to me or Lily happy to answer fantastic if you ever want to come down to school for a tour of the school or something that'd be fun absolutely recommend it yeah I don't know if we'll get it this year it's been a crazy year but we definitely have it on the horizon so yeah thank you so much okay bye everyone take care thank you bye thank you