CCA DR Blog Post #1

Question: "What, if any, experience do you have with design research and what do you hope to learn from this course?"

Reply:

Since graduating school in 2008, I've had two different design-related jobs. The first was for a luxury hardware company that catered to high-end architectural projects and the only real research that I did was occasionally perusing the websites of other hardware companies to compare their products and finishes with our products and finishes. However, this task was only rarely asked of me.

My second design-related job was as an assistant designer at a bedding company/textile studio. This job involved some market research. I often had to make trips to fabric stores in New York to see what kinds of fabrics and patterns they were selling so we could use them in our own projects or create variations. I also made trips to stores like Crate and Barrel, ABC Carpet & Home, and Macy's in order to see what kinds of products these stores that were considered "higher-end" carried. JCPenney was a large client of our studio so I also had to make a lot of trips to the only JCPenney in Manhattan which was located in Manhattan Mall (Which, can I just add, is the worst mall in America. Why is there even a mall in Manhattan?? And why is it steps away from Macy's and Penn Station which combined creates incredibly dense human traffic.).

The way that my studio worked is that we would create bedding designs and sell them to clients like JCPenney. Selling one bedding design to a company like that could in fact make a lot of money for a studio like ours. JCPenney (JCP for future reference) had both in-house designers and they out-sourced to smaller studios. They also followed a strict branding identity so all designs had to very closely resemble the style of the brand for JCP to consider purchasing the design. They outsourced because they felt that some smaller studios were more capable of creating designs that stayed true to a particular brand identity than their own team.

The more senior designers often made trips to China and India. The trips to China usually involved going to the factories we used and attending fairs to peruse and purchase the products that these factories were producing. There were also a lot of trips made to Cracker Barrel, you know, the old country store and restaurant, to see the products we produced for their stores on the shelves. Mostly to make sure that the factory had done a decent decent job in the production process, we would purchase a sample or two of the final product. We were also always encouraged to visit stores and websites that created similar products to keep up with what was current in the market.

There were very rarely any interactions with the people who purchased our products. There would sometimes be calls to our company from irritated clients, but they were mostly directed to the sales side so I'm not really sure how those situations were handled. One of the top things I really hope to learn from this course is how to better understand the needs of the client. For example, I always wondered who decided what the appropriate bedding style was for a chain store that sold mostly to the Midwest...did someone visit the homes of Midwesterners and create a style based on what they saw or was someone up top just making stuff up? I also want to be able to ask more apropos questions. In our first assignment I realized that I have a really hard time staying on task. It's so easy to stray! But maybe sometimes that leads to unexpected realizations? That's what I want to find out.