I joked that CEO stood for “Chief Everything Officer” because I did everything. I was the product designer, the industrial designer, the software designer, the interaction designer, the UX designer, the filmer, the brand guy, the service & support guy, the marketing guy, the advertising guy, shipping & receiving dept., the UI designer, the design researcher, the design strategist, and the design thinker.
And to bookend this experience, I finally printed this book — two volumes! — that is as much a scrapbook created along the way as it is a tangible record of doing something that took a lot out of me and put more than that back into me.
Also somewhat of a template for how I might represent the range of capabilities I could bring to a future organization, a new team, a new studio, or a new lab.
Plus, I can assuredly call myself a product designer and industrial designer, if that ever mattered — and not just a hardware designer, or a software designer, or an interaction designer, or a UX designer, or a UI designer, or a design researcher, or a design strategist, or a design thinker. I suppose this is to prove the point that it's not what you say you are, or what degree you got from where. What matters in the end is what you have done.
Over 10 years ago I did what everyone said I shouldn’t.
I created a hardware startup.
“Dude. Don’t do it. Hardware is hard!”
But, I did it.
Maybe it’s because I went to Montessori School and was instilled with a different set of decision making muscles.
It was hard, no doubt. They were not wrong about that.
But “hard is as hard does” to refactor Forrest Gump’s turn of phrase.
On reflection, I do think I had something to prove to myself, and I knew that particularly something had to be truly hard.
Ironically, proving to myself that I could make a beautiful bit of industrial designed product was easier than proving to others that I could do whatever it takes to get any job done, with grace and commitment.
Having done that, and now at the cusp of the product’s relaunch by its new (fantastic) owners I am wandering in that liminal in-between space where I wonder what I want to do next. What shape do I want the next 10 year chapter to take, and doing what, with what organization?
This has come to mind reflectively as I gathered all of my weeknotes, photos — everything, really — and started binding it all together in various ways.
The first binding of stuff is a two volume compedium misnamed “267 Weeks of a Hardware Startup”, which was the original name before the number of weeks grew and I figured the didactic title was more metaphorical than anything else.
When I asked a friend how I could I possibly represent the range of capabilities I could bring to a future organization they told me I should first tell them what their world would look like with me in it — leading a team, or a studio, or a lab — and then put these two volumes in front of them.
Now I’m wondering what comes next. Something that contributes to making the intermix of new ideas, new products where my way of productively wandering into new terrains to make unexpected, beautiful, functional, and useful things.
I might be doing that already, but I do wonder: what else is out there?
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