Tucker Viemeister is Lab Chief, heading research and development at Rockwell Group, lab.rockwellgroup.com. He was a founder of Smart Design where he helped design the widely acclaimed OXO “GoodGrips” kitchen tools. He also was president of Springtime-USA, a partnership with the Dutch industrial design company, and helped found Razorfish’s physical design capability and frog design’s New York office.
Could you talk about your design philosophy?
Well, first of all, my father was an industrial designer. I never thought of doing anything else as a job. It just seemed like the best thing to do. You could work on anything and everything. But when I went to college, I didn’t think that I needed to study industrial design.
You probably already got some of that education in the first part of your life.
Right, that’s what I thought. But then, when I was going to school in England, I had this idea for a Beatles nightclub. So since I was in England, I went and talked to John and Yoko about making this club. And they were like, “But why would we hire YOU to do it?” And I said, “Because I had the idea!” And they were just like, “No.” I realized that maybe I did need to go to school for design and get some credentials. So I went to Pratt.
I think my basic philosophy is that design is a tool for doing social things. I’m not interested in sculpting the perfect teapot. I’m interested in things that are going to change people’s behaviour. That’s why I like what I do now, working in the LAB at Rockwell Group. Our clients aren’t asking for specific things; they’re asking for an environment or an experience.
[mauboussin kaleidoscope from labatrockwell].
You’ve been involved in starting up many creative companies. What was the first?
My brother and I started a jewelry store in Ohio, called Ohio Silver. When we started it, I read this article that said, “Most businesses fail within their first year.” When we made it over a year we were like, “Woohoo!” And it’s still in business.
We set it up to be a place where we could make whatever we wanted. Jewelry, stained-glass windows, leather goods, anything. It was a place for us to make things, and then to support that habit we would sell the stuff. I learned two important lessons at the store. One, I learned that the price really didn’t have anything to do with the actual value of the thing. Sometimes we would make something and it wouldn’t sell. So we would lower the price. And it still wouldn’t sell. Then we would try raising the price higher and it WOULD sell.
Two, I learned that the industrial part of industrial design was really great. When we sold something, “Wow, we made money,” but then it was like, “Oh no, we have to make another one!” After I did that for a while I realized why mass-production was a good idea, rather than being the machine myself. So that’s when I went back to being a real “industrial designer” again.
What led you to Smart Design?
I met this guy at a party, Davin Stowell. A couple of days later a friend of mine who was working with him called up. Davin had just moved down from Corning, NY, and he and a bunch of his friends from Syracuse had this project of designing the information panels for the Empire State Building. So I went to his apartment and he that was the beginning of Smart Design.
How did Smart Design get its first clients?
Davin started off with Corning Inc. as his client. He went to Syracuse University and he was from Corning, NY, so that was pretty much the place to work. He’s a great designer, and they were very happy with the stuff he designed. He said he was going to quit and move to New York City. And the Corning design director said, “You should work for us as a consultant, and we’ll pay you a certain amount every month.”
So he came down here, and he had this job he was doing on a regular basis for Corning. They they started asking for more work. And then his friend got the job doing the Empire State Building graphics. From there it was just word-of-mouth. With design, if you’re doing a good job for someone, other people want you to do it too. If you’re doing a bad job, then it’s harder to sell. You’ll probably need a marketing guy and advertising and stuff.
And from there you went on to open Frog Design’s New York studio, if my internet research told me the truth.
Well, I was the chair of the IDSA conference and I wanted people to think about the future. So I got a bunch of people to come and make predictions about ten years from then. Bruce Nussbaum, joking around, said, “There will only be five design companies in the future, and one of them will be “Smart Frog.” Everybody got a big laugh out of that.
This friend of mine, Steven Holt was working at Frog. He goes, “That’s actually not such a bad idea. Frog needs an office in New York.” And I thought that the mixture of Smart’s very smart design and Frog’s gung-ho, emotive design was a good combination. We almost merged with them. Smart decided not to do it, but Hartmut Esslinger convinced me to start the office. Dan Harden from Frog came to New York, and we went around with a realtor looking at different spaces.
We didn’t even really know how big of a office we wanted. We visited all these spaces, and then we went into one and said, “This is it!” And so that was the one we rented. And then we said, “So that means we’re going to have how many desks? How may people?” That kind of a process has its ups and downs…
I’m curious how you got into the new-media world.
That was one of the reasons I went to Frog, because they had just merged with a new-media company in Austin, TX. And so they had that kind of capability; they were doing advanced stuff like CD-ROMs.
But when I was still at Smart, I’d met Craig Kanarick, one of the founders of Razorfish. I met him when he had just started up and there were like two of them. I was really interested in what they were doing, and he was interested in us. We got a job to design a remote control for a Toshiba television, a “television of the future.” I said, “This is mostly interface design,” so we hooked up with Razorfish and did the project together.
I thought the partnership was great. The interface, the software, and the hardware all went together. So then when I went to work at Frog, I tried to get Frog and Razorfish to merge. We got very close, but then that fell apart.
Why didn’t it go through?
One of the problems was naming it. Frog thought that they had a lot of equity in their name, and Razorfish thought that they had a lot of equity. It was like, “What, are you going to call it? Frog Razorfish? Razorfrog?” So then, the same thing that happened with Hartmut happened with Razorfish, and I said, “OK, I’m going to Razorfish.”
Then the internet bubble burst. Similar to this time, the economy shrank really fast, and so I got laid off from Razorfish. But previous to that, I was talking to these Dutch guys about merging with Razorfish. They were an industrial design company from Amsterdam. When the bubble burst, again, I said, “I’ll go work with you guys.” So we started Springtime-USA. Once again, we were looking around for office space…
This is sort of a repeating pattern.
Yeah. The same thing. And then David Rockwell said, “Hey, we have extra space in here, you can have a desk.” So he sort of incubated Springtime-USA. He also had some connection with Coca-Cola. Eventually there was a new CEO at Coke, who wanted innovation. We pitched the idea that we would make an innovations think-tank here. We would think up new kinds of cans, or new displays, new drinks, new graphics, anything. They liked the idea, so we started a special Rockwell studio for Coke called Studio Red.
It was a multi-disciplinary group that wasn’t constrained by what the deliverable would be, except for that we were going to create something cool and innovative. I think that’s the ideal project for designers. Most clients come in and they ask, “We need a chair,” you know? He came in and said, “This place is not exciting. What can we do?” That kind of attitude is much better.
[sheraton toronto from labatrockwell].
How did that transition to the LAB at Rockwell Group, where we’re sitting in right now?
David decided to make the LAB a separate thing which would focus on R&D interactive design, so that’s the thread that runs through from all the way back at Smart Design: the idea that interfaces and physical components should be conceived together.
I’d like to throw your own question from the IDSA conference back at you. What do you see happening in the next 10 years?
This recession is not a regular recession. I think it’s more of a cultural shift. I don’t think the economy is going to work the same way anymore.
With everything falling apart, it presents a very interesting opportunity to rebuild.
Right. And that’s the right attitude. It’s an opportunity to build it back better, not to try to patch it up. Designers are in a great position, because we do make stuff that’s better. It’s too bad for the bankers, what do they do? We actually provide wealth, really, whereas other people just manage it and move it around. We take the raw materials and improve them.