From today, we will be running a weekly column to help this new movement grow by sharing our picks of the plethora of great ideas and good industrial design worth considering.

We rate these projects under the following five criteria:
1) Idea novelty,
2) Design quality,
3) Value for money,
4) Feasibility for manufacture and delivery, and
5) Contains an X-factor (i.e. solves an important problem, saves the earth, super awesome design etc.).

If a project gets selected you can be assured that it contains all 5 of these criteria. If you are running a crowd funding program on Kickstarter or any other platform and is interested to be considered on Design Sojourn, please drop us a message on our contact page.

HICKIES Turn your Shoes into Slip-ons.

THAT’S WHY WE’VE CREATED HICKIES® – A ground-breaking lacing system that replaces traditional shoelaces and lets you easily slip in and out of your shoes while keeping them snug and secure. Never tie or untie your shoes again! Get rid of the bows and customize your footwear.

Laces are a necessary evil. The sneaker purist may disagree, but I believe most people hate them. I remember one of the things teenagers do is to lace up a shoe so that it is loose enough to slip in but tight enough so that it won’t fall off their foot. Getting the tension right was a skill, and Hickies made this skill obsolete. But seriously folks, these Hickies, designed by husband and wife team Mariquel & Gaston, is going to be a big hit.

Back the project here.

Scanbox Turns your Mobile phone into a portable scanner.

Scanbox is an easy to use, affordable and unbelievably portable scanning box that uses your smartphone’s camera to take amazing high quality scans. It’s easy to set up and packs down flat to easily fit into your bag or brief case.

This idea is perfect for getting quick document scans on the go (i.e. concept sketches on the beach anyone?). Having a fixed position means it should get rid of the perspective error on the document edges. Designed by Phil Bosua, Ben Hillier and Luke Allen from Melbourne Australia.

Back the project here.

MaKey MaKey: An Invention Kit for Everyone.

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween. It comes ready to use out of the box with everything you see above: MaKey MaKey, Alligator Clips, USB Cable.

This project brings back memories of those electronic hobby kits you could find at your neighborhood hardware or electronics store. These days the creative development that comes from working with your hands seems lacking in schools. So I’ll support any project that encourages handwork, especially when it is so easy to use and requires no programming. Makey Makey is by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, both final-year PhD students at the MIT Media Lab.

Back the project here.

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Disclaimer:
1) Design Sojourn is not affiliated, related or sponsored by any of the projects selected here.
2) While there are plans for this to be a weekly column, we will only publish our picks if there are any that we think are suitable. We may go for weeks without publishing any.

I was shocked how hard it was preparing for Pecha Kucha Night. Even after seven iterations, I was still not done! Despite being a seasoned presenter, Pecha Kucha was a brand new experience and a challenge indeed.

For those that don’t know, Pecha Kucha is a gathering of creative minds to share what they are passionate about. As creatives like to talk, Pecha Kucha runs its presentations in a unique format; 20 slides that stay up for 20 seconds each, no more, no less. Like an emotionless robot, it all runs on automatic leaving many presenters in mid-sentence when the slide changes.

People say that we should treat the creation a presentation like a design exercise. I agree. But being forced to work within the constraint of 20 X 20 slides you suddenly realize why Simplicity is hard and very few people do it well.

In the process of creating my slide deck for Pecha Kucha and then subsequently presenting it, I relearned a number of presentation techniques that could also apply to any normal presentation that has the luxury of time.

1) Consider your Presentation Style.
Are you a presenter that tells stories and uses slides as a visual backdrop? Do you need to prepare your presentation with detailed notes? Are you the type that bullet points everything you need to say on a slide? Whichever it is, you will need to be fully aware of your presentation style and keep to it.

I’m the type that likes to talk off the cuff, flowing and ebbing to the crowd’s response. However because of the format of Pecha Kucha, I wrote everything down for fear of overrunning the 20 second per slide format. This killed my flow, as my mind struggled to switch from my usual presentation technique. I ended up referring to my notes frequently and that cost me some audience engagement.

2) Keep it Light
I also realize almost immediately that a slide presentation should not be used as a training manual.

There are just some topics that don’t work at Pecha Kucha. Explaining complex theories or scientific problems is one. It goes so fast anyway, so the heavy stuff just goes over the head.

I think my presentation on Design Thinking almost crossed the no-go line. I believe the best topics for Pecha Kucha are anecdotal stories which works great for the portfolio stories it originally started with.

In the real world, your presentation format may be in the form or a class lecture, a cozy portfolio review, or staged performance etc., regardless of what it is, be aware of how much a presentation can do before it become too much.

3) The Power of One.
One thing to keep strictly to when designing a Pecha Kucha presentation is that your total presentation should only communicate 1 key topic. Furthermore, each slide should be restricted to 1 point only. The key to keeping things simple is to ask “What am I trying to communicate?” and “Do I really need make this point?”

While this restriction is a must for a 20 second pace, I have found that this should be also a key requirement for presentations in the real world. Even with the opportunity of having more time to read the content on each slide.

I have sat through so many presentations that meander badly, or have far to many confusing bullet points on a slide. There is something to be said on the efficiency and impact of keeping slide presentations simple.

4) The Tale of 2 Presenters.
There are actually two presenters at every presentation; you and your slide.

You really figure out the value of both “Presenters” at Pecha Kucha. You can use one to support the other, or even design the presentation in a way that when combined together they tell a much bigger story.

Therefore, it is a real pity to only repeat to the audience what the bullet points on each of your slide say. Furthermore, this also means that most slide decks can be reduced by 50%.

5) Keep the Presentation Sharp.
In Pecha Kucha we are advised to keep the verbal element to 2-3 sentences a slide.

This also makes sense in normal presentations as well. Focus on the points you are trying to communicate and that will prevent you from rambling on more than you need to.

6) Pick a Topic You are Familiar With.
At Pecha Kucha always pick a topic that you are familiar with, or willing to get familiar with. When you are familiar with a topic it just rolls off your tongue naturally, especially in presentations with time constraints. Oh, don’t underestimate the value of practice, it does make perfect.

7) Pause for Effect.
One thing that was really hard to create at Pecha Kucha was strategic pauses to let points sink in. With the rapid 20 second pace, even giving people time to laugh was almost impossible. This means you could come across like you are racing through your presentation.

This challenge made me realize and cherish the importance of strategic pauses in a presentation. When you are now designing a presentation that has the luxury of more time, you can now use this time efficiently to drive home key points, increase audience engagement, or even as a great icebreaker.

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I hope you enjoyed reading my learnings from presenting at Pecha Kucha. I love to hear your thoughts, and if you have experienced Pecha Kucha please do share your learnings as well?

I’m going to be presenting at the 4th Pecha Kucha Night here in Singapore and speaking about “How design makes people’s lives better”.

In typical designer fashion I’m still tweaking it, but the premise is that it’s going to a different take on Design Thinking with the focus on what good it actually does. Hopefully it is going to be more exciting that the usual boring talk about process and tools.

It’s going to be on this Friday 18 May (Tomorrow!), 7pm at the Loft Cafe in Chinatown. If you happen to be in Singapore, do stop by and say hi! I’ve heard that it’s a full house; so do come early to get your seats.

See you there!

A little change of pace in today’s blog post. I can really relate, as I’m sure you can, to this cartoon by N.C. Winters for Freelance Switch. It does on occasion happen to me, but it gets more frequent when I’m mulling over a serious problem. How about you dear reader?

Enjoy!

Via: Freelance Switch.

Brace yourselves! I’m going to join the fray with my 2 cents worth simply because I find that many people seem to miss what the Designer Fund is extolling. I would even dare say that even the Designer Fund itself seems to miss something in the communications of their objectives.

But before we go on check out some of the current sentiments on this hot topic, researched and organized for you in chronological order:

1) The Designer Fund in all its glory! A brag list of all the exciting and successful companies that have a designer(s) as one of the founders.

2) Yongfook rants, (in respond to this brag list) in his post “Design is Horseshit!“, on how the premium set on designers is overblown and there is a lot more to running a start up than being a designer. Yongfook seems to lean towards the view that design is about creating value through making things beautiful.

3) Joshua Porter calls out YongFook in his post “Design is not Horsepoop“. Joshua’s take is that design is more than skin deep, it’s a process and a mindset. He quotes Steve Jobs saying, “Design is how it works.”

4) Finally, a bunch of us were having a conversation on Twitter today on the seemingly narrow view of design on this website: “Startups, This is how Design Works“.

You see, it is not about how you define design, but how wide (or narrow) you consider the scope of design to be. This is the same problem many people have with the whole Design Thinking shindig. Take a look at the following graphic and you’ll know what I mean.

Click on the Image for a Bigger View.

It’s one of the situations where people are both wrong and right at the same time. We are all really talking about the same thing. It’s all design. From making things look good or easy to use, to creating the right experience, to identifying opportunities for market grown through user insights etc., we are all talking about the same thing.

Now, lets go back to the Designer Fund’s point of view, and look at what they mean where they say that Designers should be part of a Startup’s founding team. What they are trying to say is no different to what some of us (go Rita-Sue!) have been saying for years, and that is we need to get a Designer in the boardroom.

When you have designers (skilled in the “Design as a Strategic Activity” bit) in the boardroom or coffee shop table (where most Startups find themselves), design becomes central to the business strategy and decision making process at the highest level. So the Design Fund believes that having Designers as founders will lead to a design driven Startup that will have a high change to build something meaningful, useful, and awesome!

But to start building, you will need everything to come together in the right way, and at this stage design switches to design implementation mode. Therefore, in reality you will need both parts of Design (and in between) as outlined in my graphic above. Any argument, for or against the Designer Fund, which only considers one part of this equation is fundamentally wrong.