Reflecting on Product Design

My path into the design sphere started in high school as I was trying to work out what type of career path I was going for. The area I excelled in the most back then was visual arts so I started investigating how I could take skills learned in art class into a marketable career. At a career fair an admissions counselor told me to consider pursuing Product Design. I hadn’t heard of the field before then but when I researched it I was instantly hooked. Looking back, the thing that really sold me was how broad ranging both the scope of work could be and the I felt that learning product design and design thinking I could feel confident doing just about anything.

I ended up getting a BFA in Product Design from the same school as the admissions counselor who first pushed me to the field: the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. There I received a generally traditional industrial design education. A lot of the emphasis was on design thinking, problem solving and storytelling. Projects and lessons were almost always in the physical realm but there was an understanding that the design space was evolving and digital experiences were becoming more important.

During my Junior year I left for Rhode Island to complete an internship with the toy giant Hasbro as an industrial designer on their Nerf team. Here, direction was heavily guided by the marketing team rather than the design team. A common brief was to design a series of blasters that were part of a pop culture theme (like Star Wars or Fortnite).

This internship challenged my notions of aesthetics as designing toy guns for children was always about the opposite of clean and simple design. It also disrupted my understanding of the design process as problem solving wasn’t always the goal and marketing often led the design direction. But ultimately I learned how to design for kids, fun and play (not as easy as it sounds).

After graduation, I took a job with a non-profit based in Flint, MI called 100K Ideas. The organization was created as a way to make entrepreneurship more accessible to the community. All ideas were welcome, and most of the clients who came in had never pursued product development or entrepreneurship before and often had extremely few resources at their disposal. Therefore, the emphasis always had to be on the Minimum Viable Product, how to move forward with a $200 budget.

As a project manager I would complete assessments of the feasibility, viability and to a lesser extent desirability of their product or service. And as a designer I could help them visualize what they were envisioning in their head. In this environment I learned how to think like an entrepreneur and how the limiting factors of business viability, engineering feasibility and budget can constrain the ambitions of a project.

Each experience has brought new lessons and I’m sure UX Academy will be no different.