Sam Hecht

British industrial designer Sam Hecht co-founded London-based design firm Industrial Facility in 2002 with Kim Colin. The studio has clients such as Braun, Muji, Whirlpool and Lacie, among others. Hecht recently visited San Francisco and spoke about his career and design process at an event organized by the furniture purveyors at Arkitektura. There were some good nuggets in his talk that are worth sharing. Here are some of the salient bits:

• Architects are comfortable talking about concepts, whereas designers have to wait for things to be finished. And the product is the thing you can really talk about.
• Many people are focused on consumers’ shopping habits and don’t worry about their experience with the product after they buy it. Hecht is interested in what happens after the shipment, though.
• Most industrial design is thought about in isolation, as if nothing else exists.
• Most companies don’t realize that people read words and sentences, not letters. So