Dan Formosa - Founding Member of Smart Design

Dan Formosa is one of the founding members of Smart Design. He was gracious enough to sit down with a humble Monkee correspondent and answer a few questions. Check out what Dan has to say about starting your own design company, how to dress to impress and much, much more...

What is your schooling background and how long have you been a designer?

Since graduating undergraduate school with Syracuse University in 1977, and then from that I went into designing as a consultant, I never worked for a large corporation but as a consultant. I then got a masters and PhD some time later from NYU in economics and biomechanics.

There were quite a few people that started smart design…

Yeah, most of the people went to college together!

When a company comes to you, how do you make sure you satisfy what they went as well as yourselves?

Well there’s no set practice or procedure because every company is different. I think when we started and what we do now is that we have an attitude that design is as much about the thing as it is the people. So the first thing is understanding the people. We may have some initial vision of where we wanna take a product, but that’s more of a rare case. For the most part we actually set out and really do our homework, do fieldwork, study and talk to people We also have this approach where, and this is different from a lot of companies even now, where rather than doing a research phase, then a design phase and then an evaluation phase we’ve got these very small iterations where we research design and evaluations, so have this rapid way of thinking, prototyping and experimenting various designs.

When a student comes to you with their portfolio, what do you look for, and how should they be dressed?

Well starting with the wearing, there’s a lot of stuff that can qualify. We very rarely, if ever, end up around here in a jacket and tie unless we’re invited to some type of formal dinner.  Typically with no matter what company your working with you would dress casually, dressing well but not necessarily jacket and tie. So if you get dressed how you would if you knew people where going to be looking at you you’ll be fine, you don’t want to go too ratty because that’s probably not the best first impression.

As far as their portfolio and attitude; first the work has to be good, it’s very important that they can show their level of passion of where they want to go, what design is, not that they have to have they’re whole life planned out but just have a good idea. Also people tend to have the final product in their portfolio, like tada! Here it is! Here’s my final answer! But what’s actually more important and interesting is the journey of how you got there, what you chose what you didn’t, who you spoke too, what sort of homework you did. Making connections, something that you found out in your fieldwork and connected it back. So the whole journey, the experimentation is really important and a lot of time people de-emphasize that, but it can be the most important part of the conversation and the most interesting.

 

Could you explain a little bit about emotional mapping?

It’s interesting because emotion plays a huge role s does perception. Very early on when we started in 1981, one of the first projects was designing a line of sunglasses and we approached it unlike any other design firm had. I had known and worked with some cognitive psychologists. And what we said was, first off all we cant find any standards out there for how to size sunglasses. We were going to take on this giant fashion project, but we also wanted the sunglasses to fit people so we did lots of homework and searched everywhere from the fashion industry to Nasa, who made goggles for astronauts or the military who had lots of anthropology information, but we couldn’t find things that detail them for sunglasses. So we measured large amounts of people, found head widths, nose angles, all the stuff a designer would want to know and apply it to sunglasses or eyewear in general. When we proposed that study, we said we’re not only going to be measuring these people, but we’re also going to do a perception study. So we used cognitive psychology to measure their perceptions of what’s big and what’s not big. Because you can find out someone’s angles, but what it doesn’t tell you is what feels to tight or too loose. So what we wanted to do with the sunglasses was know that we were within range not only with the size range, but the pressure range.  We found that this study was successful, and like I said no one else was doing things like that at the time. While a lot of designers talk about emotion, very few designers are working with the understanding of it, working with psychologists in a way that would actually add to the understanding and feel of the design. So we have methods of quantifying perceptions and emotions and it’s actually very informative, it’s like food for the design team to act on. For instance, there’s a difference between what men and females think about certain products, and you kind of know that for being alive for a while, but if you actually look closer it actually is really fascinating and as a design team you can really act on that and explore that. We’ve been doing this for a while and there’s still a lot of ground to be covered.

You’ve been designing for while, how would you say industrial design and design in general has changed and where do you see it going?

Well I think historically we used to all be about the object, and I’m talking about the 1930’s and 40’s, 50’s. Design was really about the thing but now design is really at a turning point. Designers are now people who really understand people. Also designers don’t necessarily have a monopoly on design, whether it be psychologists, doctors, scientists, they all have input. Which means design has really changed into something where you have to understand that there are positions in creating products that work for people. The whole profession is really changing rather rapidly. So there is really a much different and larger focus and we need to understand people more then we ever have before. That’s probably been happening since 1980’s and I think we were one of the groups that were involved in that initial turning point. There were a couple of people that were realizing that there was a lot of opportunity to look at psychology and social issues in design. Even now for example when I go to a lot of design schools I may just talk about very basic issues like biomechanics; how does the hand work? And most people don’t know, in fact most professionals don’t know that. So I think there has been a very elementary shift in the profession and it’s very interesting to see how designers respond to actually take that course, the course they should take, or if they stick to the same thing. You may end up just being an executor, where someone else would be calling the shots in the design because they’re just better connected as human beings.

With design being so different back when you started Smart Design what were the main challenges of starting a design firm?

Well I think what’s interesting and hard to remember was that in the 1960/70’s the field of design was actually in a pretty bad state. There was not a whole lot of respect, interest or investment in design companies or corporations. Now that doesn’t mean there wasn’t great design in furniture and things like that, there was some highlights, but for the most part design was considered to be something that you added to a product that was already finished, you know, get the designer to put a shell on it. Basically it was nothing like it is today. As we were coming up through college in the 60’s and early 70’s, there were a lot of evil things in the world, because the 60’s was a radical generation. So that included things like, the government is evil, big business is evil, cars are evil, just a lot of evil around the world. When we came out of college, we were of the understanding that design should change the world. This coming from the idea that design was not being utilized like it should be. So our choice was either to work for one of the bigger design firms or to just start our own! It seemed like working together was better than actually getting a job. But it actually wasn’t much different, design was in a state back then, it was really kind of crappy. If you saw something back then that looked like it had been designed people became very suspicious because they may have invested in the superficial aesthetics to cover up the God-awful tooling, or whatever else was going on. There was a lot of decoration going on in the 60’s and 70’s, design was treated as very superficial. As a matter of fact when we first started we had to explain to companies that they shouldn’t just call us in at the end of a project, which was typical of a lot of companies to do. The whole thing would be completed and done, and now they needed some coloring, or to put a shell on it, so design was in a much different state back then.

I read that you have a book describing baseball rules through design, could you tell us more?

We were working a lot on one of our pet projects, which was information design, figuring out how people understand things. We were doing a lot of projects in graphic design and

I had this idea a long time ago to take on some sort of information design and realized that baseball is more fascinating than 99% of people realize. I worked a lot with this graphic designer, and he was a big baseball fan too and we started looking at the rules. The rules of baseball go back over100 years and they are totally dysfunctional as they were written by comities. It is just the most God-awful document that you ever want to read. Baseball is really complex and we decided this would be a thrilling topic for information design, what if we actually untangled this and explained it, even to the point where we explain where its vague. So what we did was we re-write the rules, we layed out the book using the core principles of information design. We made it like a field guide and actually called it the "Baseball Field Guide" and designed it to be easily referenced.

We actually designed the layout and then filled in the information, which is usually the opposite way around. But we were also doing this simultaneously, so for instance as much as possible wherever we start and stop a topic we’d try and finish it on one page or double spread page so that as much as possible you don’t have to flip the page to continue the thought.

What is your advice to designers, students or recent graduates, trying to get out into the real world and start their own firm?

Well I think what you want first is a point of view. When you start your own business that means you do everything, which I think is extremely healthy in design. This means you have to put yourself together, you have to get your story together: Who are you? What do you stand for? What do you do? You need to put your own presentation together, go and a meet and find clients, you’ve got to then go home and when they hand you a project you’ve go to do the project proposal, plan, you gotta figure out how your gunna work, you gotta figure out how your gunna work, how your gunna work together, you’ve got to deal with budgeting, figuring out what equipment you need, what products, what computers, what programs, what kind of shop equipment you need, you gotta sweep the floor and wash the dishes!

It’s very interesting because when you get a job things get very segmented, so there’s a very large level of exposure you gain from either working in a small office or starting your own company that’s sort of a boot camp and it’s not always pleasant! You’ve got to learn a lot in a fairly short time.

 

A big Monkee thanks to Dan for taking time out his busy schedule to chat with us!