Design the New Business is a film that documents the relationship between design and business and the way they are interacting and changing each other.

Erik Roscam from Zilver Innovation came up with the idea (shall I say challenge?) of gathering a group of students from the Strategic Product Design master program at TU Delft to do a documentary. The goal was to do a film in short period of time, with a very limited amount of resources and with people (designers) that didn’t have any idea of how to do a film. And we did it.

The project was done together with Erik van Bergen, Esra Gokgoz, Gunjan Singh, Juan David Martin and Marta Ferreira de Sá. An extremely diverse and international group.

My personal role in the project was equally diverse, I was/am the social media manager, webpage administrator and designer, interviewer, editor and director of the movie. Most of these responsibilities were shared with different team members in different moments and degrees.

The movie will be released to the general public in November of 2011, meanwhile it will be showcased in film festivals such as: A design film festival, Film + Design Festival and more.

My friends Esra Gokgoz and Marta Ferreira de Sá interviewed Theo Jansen for a research article that they recently published about the suspension of disbelief in the creative process. Afterwards Theo asked them to bring “two strong friends” to help carrying parts of his latest strandbeest to the beach. And well, though I am not particularly strong I ended up joining them.

It was a great experience to see how this beasts actually work and an honor to get to know Theo Jansen, an incredibly kind and dedicated human being. I never expected him to be so modest and caring. Work hard and be nice to people, that’s what they say.

That day I also got to know Sandy (Ian Frazier) who was at that moment writing a piece about Theo Jansen for The New Yorker. I remember that we chatted a bit about the illustrations of the magazine, his personal work and the current situation in Mexico. Amazingly enough he decided to mention us on his article.

Great times, beautiful experience.

Find videos of that day and Sandy’s article in The New Yorker below:

themarchofthestrandbeests

You can download the article here.

Axixa was recently published in 1,000 Product Designs book by Eric Chan from ECCO Design.

The Urbanfarm project was published in The Tote Bag Book by Jitesh Patel in the UK.

Toctoc is an organization founded in 2009 by Miguel Melgarejo in collaboration with other Mexican designers initiated to bring together the creative talent based in Monterrey, Mexico to share, discuss and promote the design within the community.

The community is currently conformed by more than 3,000 people, among which students, professionals, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts of design can be found.

Its current services include activities such as TOCTOC Nights, a bimonthly event that brings together more than 300 creative talents in order to make contacts, share knowledge and generate discussion.

TOCTOC Night – Grupo W & Digital Invaders

TOCTOC is expanding and is gradually reaching more parts of the Mexican republic. Some of their activities are also beginning to have international repercussions.

For more information visit www.toctoc.mx or contact me.

Project under development.

Those are the challenges addressed in this project developed in collaboration with Evelien Griffioen, Joost van Hoof, Stephanie Kool, Wouter Volkers and Rachel Wu, under the BPS course of the Strategic Product Design master in TU Delft.

Strategy to enforce touchpoints and diversify services:

The strategy developed to reach the new goal is comprised of two steps.

The first step is to enforce the brand touchpoints in order for them to deliver more suitable services for their customers, help the brand to generate market awareness in social media and build new customer feedback channels.

The second step is to diversify the brand product and service offering to their market by using the same business model approach; with this, new stores with diverse offerings to the market will be successfully opened.

The experience of the SUITSUPPLY client will be enriched and the company will be able to expand its market share and reach their new strategic goal.

Suitsupply main goal is to grow exponentially in the upcoming years, 500 stores for 2018, the proposed strategy reframes this goal and sets it to 300 stores.

Analysis of the company (fragment)

Brand touchpoints

New proposed touchpoint

New proposed services

New service example

A couple of years ago I heard that it was relatively common for Mexican inmates to tattoo an image of the Guadalupe Virgin (and another saints and figures) in places where they didn’t wanted to get hit, evidently, in a deeply religious country as Mexico, god, saints and virgin’s images inspire respect, no one wants to get in trouble with the holy, or at least to open that possibility.

Mexico is nowadays suffering from a tremendous amount of violence the, such called, war against drug trafficking, has caused more than 10,000 casualties just in 2010 without discriminating between civilians, this war has pretty much taken away the sense of security from Mexican people.

Much is said about the purpose and possible endings of this war, the truth is that no one can see the light at the end of the tunnel; bloodsheds, blockades, executions, bombings, persecutions and shootings are now seen as normal, and that is scary.

Faith plays a very important role in moments like this, sometimes is the only thing left to have.

In this hope is that I can say that, indeed, I have designed the most effective bulletproof vest in the world.