I was befriended in my 3rd year at school by a small group of Final Year Industrial Designers. Two of these are of note; Adam Ellis who merges the landscape with product design and his knowledge of plants, and Thomas Sutton, who applied his calculator style intellect to product design. The differentiating factor with these two designers over the others in their year (which was the best year of ID in NZ I have seen) was that they designed for a reason. Both had different but compelling visions about what design was in their minds and how they would approach it, and both had an abundance of natural talent. They set the benchmark for my final year at design school.

I was befriended in my 3rd year at school by a small group of Final Year Industrial Designers. Two of these are of note; Adam Ellis who merges the landscape with product design and his knowledge of plants, and Thomas Sutton, who applied his calculator style intellect to product design. The differentiating factor with these two designers over the others in their year (which was the best year of ID in NZ I have seen) was that they designed for a reason. Both had different but compelling visions about what design was in their minds and how they would approach it, and both had an abundance of natural talent. They set the benchmark for my final year at design school.

Thomas worked for Te Papa design studio whilst it was being built and then moved directly to Italy, and has been there ever since. I visited Tom in 1999 whilst he was working for Design Continuum, he since moved on to establish the Industrial Design office in Milan of Flextronics, a major international semiconductor manufacturer with a wide range of manufacturing and distribution capability. Flextronics acquired Frog Design and Tom Sutton moved across and is now the Associate General Manager of the Milan office.

Tom has built the office from an initial skeleton staff of 4 to a team of over 20 in four years of operation. They cover a wide range of areas from engineering and product design to interaction design. They are working for large corporations in the consumer product domain primarily from what I could discern, although do work for Italian companies who need an international grade agency. Frog have a team of 130+ in Austin, Texas and have range of hardcore technology experts based there. Tom said that they have a team that is just focussed on the latest in technology trends that can be sequestered into Beta products for clients that want to test new platforms. This is particularly so in web platforms and programming.

They used to undertake only a small amount of design research but this has grown substantially over the last few years to being a very important part of the business now. A typical output of this would be an extended PowerPoint presentation that may lead them through the key insights about how the customers and users are interacting with the product.


They use each other in the different locations if the project requires it and all invoicing etc is centralised. In the US the different locations comprise of a single company, whilst those in Europe are separate registered entities.
 

The studio itself is long and narrow and is part of the Flextronics group building in Monza, it has the frog green accents in the space and has a casual Italian feel with designers drifting between desks and talking amongst each other on their projects. The morning meeting consisted of Tom and one of his key designers discussing presentations that week and the key projects they are working on. Plenty of jokes and jibes pepper the chat about projects and soon everyone is back at work.



I talk through our approach to design at Lunch and the whole studio attends (it may have been the sandwiches!), this is followed by a pretty extended discussion about sustainability and the challenges that it presents a designer.

In fact some of the discussion centres on the continuing burden on the industrial designer that elements such as sustainability bring. Tom and I discuss this later on, it is a hard thing to define product and industrial design right now with the increasing range of specialisations extending the discipline.

I outlined to the team that our approach was to integrate sustainability from the ground up in all of our work, and that I felt this was the only way it could become an advantage not a burden to the process. I also tried to reiterate that it is not all data, and that life cycle thinking offered some opportunities for really strategic creativity.

We finish off with a few laughs and the last of the sandwiches are hoovered up before returning to the work at hand.



The team are about to move to a new premises closer to where most of the team live that is a step up on the current place.

Tom has carved out a good team and has positioned Frog well within the Italian design context.