At the tail-end of the wildly popular IDSA Render Challenge (568 submissions!), I managed to catch up with Juror, Industrial Designer and Marketer Robert Nightingale and talk shop. As a part of WeCross, a huge open-concept collaborative space near Lower Manhattan, Robert and his small firm RBRTNGHTNGL is a proponent of cross-pollennation of talents, fields and processes.
First off, WeCross is something like GrabCAD physicalized. Everyone is tapping away on a computer. Small firms and professionals from Architecture to Fashion to Engineering work within the Glass perimeter, working at the usual frenetic pace seen in New York City. One of Robert’s current projects with BikeID was started purely by the opportunity that a shared space offers.
Robert is one of the Directors at the IDSA. I asked him about his thoughts on the challenge, without giving too much away of course. “At first, the submissions were really simple. We were like ‘Oh god didn’t they read the brief?’ But more and more, as they came through, they became more and more exciting.”. Like any first draft, there’s always uncertainty about what is best. A few weeks in, there was no doubt in Robert’s mind that this was going to be a tough challenge to vet.
“[All of the Jurors] all going to sit down in the office here and put every single submission on a big screen, read the briefs as we go through each one.”
There are no hard rules on colour with CAD or Design. “When I present my first models to a client, I do so in monochrome. Colour can be quite polarizing. Intiailly, we present the concept and then introduce colour to add another dimension to it.” Customization of products is something that Robert’s clients are keen on – Customers get to customize their own colour. Delegating complete colour control to the customer can be dangerous – themes, schemes and select palettes are often employed. But not always – any colour can be chosen for the BikeID.
Whatever choices GrabCADrs have made, hopefully it has been informed by the form and concept, without totally confusing the potential user, adding, as Robert said, another Dimension. The results will be announced at the IDSA Conference in Hartford, CT.
