14 years ago, I attended Yoshiko Sakurai’s seminar for small business audience. She said, when you read a book, have a pen or pencil in your hand, and underline the parts that means something to you. If you do that for 10 years, you will be standing here instead of me, giving seminar about the subject you specialize in. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, Outliers, you spend a lot of your time on something, and in 10 years, you reach professional level. From experience, I believe in what they said.
One of the things I have spent a lot of my time over the past 10 years is doing user experience research for product design purposes. And over the past 10 years, working in roles of sales representative, interpreter, or coordinator, I have been fortunate to observe closely the behaviors and process of incredibly talented designers such as David Tonge, Takeshi Ishiguro, Steve Louie. Sharing my learning from these masters and other great designers, as well as real life learning from hundreds of people I interviewed and thousands of people I observed just might help enrich someones understanding. And with that thought, I decided to start up this design essay project. From today until 31 December 2010, I will write an entry each day about various topics around design and research, some in English, and others in Japanese. I hope the articles will inspired the readers in some way, as many articles on the web did to me.
FUJIKO SUDA 