Dan Harden Announces Whipsaw Design Lab

Design at its best is about creating something truly special. Something original, clever, breathtaking, and uncompromised. Every good designer strives to attain these ideal traits in their solutions. Achieving this level of design purity and perfection is often a life purpose for a designer.

As a consultancy, we try to reach this design nirvana with every single job, but more often than not something gets in the way. A dubious marketing requirement, cost factors, manufacturing difficulty, or even client politics can force compromises on your precious design. Add up the compromises along a typical product development path and if you’re not careful, your design will get watered down to the point where it is no longer recognizable.  At Whipsaw, we push hard not to compromise on the critical design elements, but sometimes business or engineering concerns win out, and you end up with far less perfection than your original vision what you had originally envisioned. The market won’t know it, but you will always know how much better a design could have been.

For these detrimental reasons, we started an initiative at Whipsaw called Whipsaw Design Lab. WDL is a design playground. It’s a place where our internal team explores all kinds of concepts just for the sake of design, instead of a client problem. WDL has no requirements, clients, timelines, or limits. Just pure Design spelled with a capital D. And most of all, no compromises.

WDL intends to free our thinking, dream bigger, and challenge ourselves to attain even higher design standards. It sharpens our edge. It allows designers to access their highest creative potential partly because there are no constraints. At the same time, WDL will also benefit clients since the team will be exploring the frontiers of design, which may very well apply to a client’s company. Unlike red ocean strategy that maximizes competition within existing industries, or blue ocean strategy that contemplates unknown areas to create new demand, we think of WDL as a white ocean strategy – pure innovation without an endgame. And simply put, it’s fun.

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