Gordon Bruce
Gordon Bruce is the owner of Gordon Bruce Design LLC and has been a design consultant for 45 years working with many multinational corporations in Europe, Asia and the USA. He has worked on a wide range of products, interiors and vehicles – from aeroplanes to computers to medical equipment to furniture.
From 1991 to 1994, Gordon Bruce was a consulting vice president for the Art Center College of Design’s Kyoto programme and, from 1995 to 1999, chairman of Product Design for the Innovative Design Lab of Samsung (IDS) in Seoul, Korea. In 2003, he played a crucial role in helping to establish Porsche Design’s North American office. For many years, he served as head design consultant for Lenovo’s Innovative Design Center (IDC) in Beijing. He recently worked with Bühler, in Switzerland, and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., in China. Gordon Bruce is a visiting professor at several universities in the USA and China. He has been an author for Phaidon Press, London and has written for several international design magazines. He has several products in various permanent design collections such as with MoMA, in New York City. Gordon Bruce recently received Art Center College of Design’s “Lifetime Achievement Award”.
Red Dot in an interview with Gordon Bruce
Red Dot: Why should every company work in a design-oriented way?
Gordon Bruce: Designing at its most fundamental level is all about creating relationships – be they tangible or intangible. Design is present throughout all nature, from the arrangement of DNA to the arrangement of our universe and beyond. Design can also be found throughout our culture, for example in the patterns of music scores, in food recipes, and in the sentence structures of our writing. Design runs through our professions: from graphic art to interface and product design to architecture and more.
Which aspects make a product perfect?
A perfect product offers a perfectly natural experience. Its design has to relinquish anything unnecessary while enhancing the essential. A perfect product should be based on a big idea – a new idea or the improvement of an old idea – which advances rituals people depend on in daily life through improved clarity, performance and distinctiveness.