#002: Rob Irwin Takes Us On His Journey To Becoming An Industrial Designer

Your host, Rob Irwin introduces himself and his story. He takes us on a journey to becoming an Industrial Designer, the mentors he had along the way, and the epiphany that shook him back to the calling of Design.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I had been pondering my schooling. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? What career am I going to have? You know, all the ramblings of the mind of a late teenager trying to figure out what the hell they wanted to do with their life. So the words of Popenec's book, In Designing for the Real World, that how industrial design was quote, the most, if not fully responsible for all the waste we see in the world. And that really stuck with me. And, you know, and then it hit me.

UNKNOWN: 0:38

I'm going back. I'm going back to school.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

Hi guys, what is up? This is Rob Irwin, your host for Designing in the Wild. So for this second episode, I wanted to kind of give everybody a background on my story. It's been wild. You know, I've been an industrial designer for 17 years. But, you know, not a lot of people know why industrial design. Why did I choose... to get into this career, why it interests me so much. There was a lot of things that transpired in my youth that interestingly or inevitably enough led me to industrial design. I'll back up for a minute, just say that the headlines would read in the professional realm. I've won some awards. I've got a few patents. I've worked with and designed products for more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies. I designed and built my own tiny home, which was pretty wild. HGTV actually featured me on one of their episodes in the Tiny House Big Living Season 1. I think it was Episode 14. That's a fun watch, but... Um, anyway, I, you know, I wanted to kind of start from the beginning and, uh, take you on a little journey here. Um, you know, I was raised by a single mom, but she was very supportive, uh, in my artistic side and sparking inspiration everywhere. And as often as she could go to museums, art stores, she'd, she'd let me get dirty, you know, as a kid that, you know, she'd let me play in puddles and, and experiment with clay and paint and throw food everywhere. And, You know, stuff you do as a kid, I guess. But, you know, from fifth grade to twelfth grade was an interesting scenario. I had the same shop teacher from fifth grade all the way through to my senior year. I guess you could kind of say he was my first mentor. And, you know, not having a father, that kind of really, you know... I gravitated towards because, uh, you know, you come as a young, young man looking for kind of that feedback and someone to teach you, uh, cool and interesting shit. So, you know, he was, uh, kind of my introduced me first person introduced me to, uh, CAD. I think I was working in version R12, uh, which some of the old school people might remember back in the day, but, um, I'm not sure there was hardly any 3D work happening quite yet there. It was all plan view stuff and elevation drawings and whatnot. I was still doing hand drafting in one of his architecture classes by the time I got to junior. And senior year, he invited me to, in one of my independent studies classes, to teach his architecture class to the younger students, which was a ton of fun. kind of started to dip my toes into figuring out how to convey ideas in a concise way. And that was a lot of fun. So he was a big influence in my life moving over to getting into industrial design. I remember one day he I was nearing the end of my senior year in high school and he kind of brought me over and said, you know, what are you going to do after this? Where are you going? And I thought maybe I'd hop over to K-State and be an architecture student and study architecture and design buildings. And he said, you know, knowing kind of that I liked to get my hands dirty and build things and I was kind of, you He said, why don't you go upstairs to the art room and check out the poster on the wall? And so I did. I walked up there and there was an ad from the Art Institute of Colorado for industrial design. I read a couple of the bullet points and I thought, wow, that'd be really cool. This is a vocation that would allow me to be creative in almost every category, whether it was architecture or Soft goods, furniture, packaging design, a lot of heavy lifting in industrial design as conceptual rendering and drawing. And I was pretty good at putting pen to paper. So I went for it. But at that time, this was kind of like the chapter of seeing the world with critique. So, of course, being a teenager, you're kind of deviant and you're wanting to kind of explore new things. And before my senior year, I really wasn't much of a reader. But I started reading books. I started doing a ton of reading. And at the time, my grandparents had passed away, and so I had gone out to kind of rummage through their stuff before it was a big estate sale. And I'm kind of climbing all over these boxes in their barn, and I happen upon this box. Inside this box, there were an entire complete edition collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. It's like a 14-book set. They're probably no bigger than a small journal, each one of them. Relatively thick books. Gold leaf edges. I think it was copyright like 1889 or something. I got one right here. Let me check it out. So... Yeah. Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1887. Um... This was a game changer for me in my mind. With such an impressionable mind as a teenager. I think I was in my late 17, maybe early 18 years of age. And that summer I ended up sitting on the dock of my late grandma and grandpa's dock on the lake. And I rifled through all 14 of these books. And I'll tell you... That was an interesting summer. You know, what 18 year old is sitting on a dock, just rifling through 110 year old philosophy books. I don't know, but you know, ultimately it kind of led me to starting to, you know, to dig into Kant's critique of pure reason, Nietzsche, human, all that, you know, his human, all too human book. And the house we were living in at the time was falling apart, which was, my grandparents' house. We moved into that after they passed. And it was on Buckeye Lake in Ohio, by the way. So I said, well, why don't I just design you a new house? You know, kind of jokingly. And so I did. So they tore that house down at the end of that summer, started building the house I designed. And that was the first moment in my life where I got to watch from concept to reality, something come to fruition that I created that would change someone's life. And I think that as a product designer, as a designer in general, I think in the background of most creatives' minds is to kind of shape perspective, shape experience, shape the reality in which we live to make it brighter, make it better. So that was pretty wild. After that summer, I did end up going to the Art Institute of Colorado. But, you know, this is kind of where things start to get interesting, in my opinion, or at least quite circuitous route to becoming an industrial designer. You know, so I was second in my second semester at the Art Institute. And a couple of friends from back home in St. Louis called me up and we were chatting. You got to read this book. I'm like, OK, OK. So I pick it up. I read it. I read another book of the author. And I thought, wow, this really shapeshifted my mind into a whole other perspective. And the book was called Ishmael. It's by Daniel Quinn. The second book was Beyond Civilization. And once I read Designing for the Real World by Victor Popinec, I wanted no part in the career of industrial design. I mean, it sounds crazy, but all the things that have been leading me up to being a creative in all sorts of different categories or just being a creative and getting paid for it was shattered by reading just a few of these books. And basically, they uncovered ideas about how and why we've lost our vision as a civilization, where we're going because of it, and how much waste is produced in the industrial design profession. There'll be more on that one later. But, yeah. I mean, what do you do with that information? It's like, okay, I want to go design a bunch of stuff. You don't think about the background, kind of cause and effect of a profession that deeply when you're just getting into the actual profession, right? I guess at this point, this was kind of where I was thinking, okay, well, what is my legacy going to be? I was extrapolating all the way out to what people are going to read about me when I'm gone. Completely ridiculous, but that's where my headspace was at. So I guess right about this time before I decided what I decided, I dug a little deeper into Daniel Quinn's Kind of following, if you will. And there was a spinoff website group called New Tribal Ventures. It's still up. You can Google it. And I came upon, you know, like an events page. And I was living in, obviously, Denver, Colorado at the time. And this person had posted a potluck that they were going to host at someone else's house. I ended up attending it and I immediately gravitated towards it. speaking with this person and wanting to talk with them more. I guess enter second mentor. And so his name was Andrew. He was a nomad, a traveler. He hopped from ashram to ashram. He was soft-spoken, but had a very targeted way with his words. He was patient in getting his ideas across in a way that when he spoke, everyone would kind of lean in with full attention to make sure they had heard everything he said. And, you know, he practiced extreme minimalist living, but he'd also designed and built geodesic domes, lived in intentional communities, and later developed a profound way of resetting the mind and body. He called it the darkness conjecture. You can look it up. I believe he has a YouTube presentation he gave some years ago on the subject. Andrew Durham is his name, D-U-R-H-A-M. Great guy. So... We ended up meeting a second time and we met at a Greek coffee house one cold weekend afternoon in Denver. He had been passing through after attending another workshop in Boulder. It's called The Event. And The Event kind of, this thing is like a spinoff of the focus group therapy sessions that started in the 70s. You get locked in a room with 20 or 30 other strangers and the aim is to unpack your story Right. Like the thing that's been holding you up, the story you tell yourself about yourself. That like ultimately reflects in their patterns in your life. And, you know, the workshop is based kind of on work by Stephen Karpman. He called it the drama triangle. Your story plays like you're either the victim, the persecutor or the rescuer. Anyway, so to get back to me. So after all this. meeting with Andrew and chatting and reading these books, I decided to leave college. I was going to go and disappear. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I didn't want to be an industrial designer. I don't want to create any more waste in the world. Who wants to be a part of that? And so I went on what I called the journey of personal enlightenment. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Um, so like Kerouac and on the road. So I left college and moved back to St. Louis. Um, I decided to make a journey, uh, in my grandmother's hand-me-down four-door Cadillac DeVille. Uh, so with one willing friend, we drove from St. Louis, Missouri to Yonkala, Oregon for this gathering that Andrew had mentioned a while back when we were chatting. It was called the Eco Raw Tribal Gathering. And, uh, It's exactly what it sounds like. So we took a four-day drive for a nine-day stay in the middle of, honestly, one of the most beautiful valleys I've ever been to. And we camped. But on the seventh morning, I woke up just before the sun peered into our valley. I kind of popped my head outside the tent, smelled the fresh, cool, dewy morning air. I mean, it was this amazing scene. And I decided to head over to what they called the first light field in And as this, as the name would suggest, is where the first light of the sun hits the valley in the morning. And we would go do yoga. So as I walked down the path, I kind of plucked some berries, kind of slowly waking up. And then it happened. Like the sun hit my face with all its brightness and warmth as I was taking him back. I stopped fully in my tracks to close my eyes and soak it all in. I mean, it was just something out of a movie. And this, like, epiphany struck. And all I can say is that something came over me. I don't quite know how to describe it. Of course, I had been pondering my schooling. You know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? What career am I going to have? You know, all the ramblings of the mind of a... of a late teenager trying to figure out what the hell they wanted to do with their life. So the words of Poppenack's book, In Designing for the Real World, that how industrial design was, quote, the most, if not fully responsible for all the waste we see in the world. And that really stuck with me. And, you know, and then it hit me. I'm going back. I'm going to go back to school. I'm going to change the way industrial design not only operates, but but be the shift that moves design away from its material negligence and its kind of one-time produced planned obsolescence. So I did. We drove back. I focused on sustainability and started reading every book I could get my hands on that talked about the subjects that kind of revolved around all of these issues. Cradle to Cradle, like Bill McDonough with his Upcycle Ability, circular economies i read janine benyus book biomimicry paul hawking had a ton of books on material procurements and uh you know product life cycle analysis designing for the environment i mean the list went on and on i was just like a sponge sucking up all this this energy and this new profound direction that i had for my career for my life for my legacy really really what it came down to and and so you know looking back i can see how each investment from from others, from experiences, and from serendipitous timing of it all slowly formed in how I see and approach problem solving now. And for that, I'm grateful. So that's a little bit of me in the nutshell, a little bit of where I came from. I may do a couple stories on this myself, peppered in through all the rest of the next amazing guests that we're gonna be having. And I hope you all enjoyed the story. It's going to be an interesting ride for myself and I hope informative and inspirational for everybody else. Thanks for tuning in. This is Designing in the Wild. I'm your host, Rob Irwin, signing off.