New York, jamiewolfond.com; goodthingny.com In 2014, only a year out of RISD, the Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based designer launched Good Thing, a suddenly of-the-moment design brand focused on the development and manufacture of small goods and housewares. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? In the US, designing a product seldom ends with the object itself, but continues all the way through the process of bringing that thing to an audience. When I was in school I wanted very little to do with American design. I’d been closely following the work of several European designers (in particular the Dutch, with Droog and the many other designers making process-based work there) and was a little jealous of them for being in a part of the industry with a great infrastructure for licensing. In Europe, there are so many manufacturing companies, and there’s such a strong market for unusual objects, that a designer doesn’t have to think about much more than the creative process. A manufacturing company handles production, sales, and all liability, leaving the designer with a tidy quarterly royalty check and the free time to move on to another idea. And yet, after I spent two summers working with designers in the Netherlands — first DHPH/Maarten Baas, and then Studio Bertjan Pot, two of the very best experimental designers in the industry — I found that the licensing model in Europe doesn’t leave very much opportunity to experiment beyond the design of the object itself. The flip side of a strong infrastructure for licensing design is that the companies that operate in this way have long since formulated their own ideas of what will and won’t sell. This makes it really difficult to introduce completely new ideas to the market. For example, I really hoped to find an opportunity to license my Sticker Clock design with a Dutch company, but consistently received feedback that customers would not buy something with the perceived value of a sticker. There was something really unnatural about ending the design process by simply taking someone’s word for it. The way a designer creates a product is by repeatedly testing ideas, and reacting to the result. I realized I could get a great deal more imperial feedback from trying to sell the clock than from trying to license it. The truly amazing thing about American design is the newfound prevalence of the designer/businessperson. …
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