Here come the judges

On Friday, Wendy and I were invited to be guest judges for her old boss/our good friend James Chu's Advanced Product Design 3 class at Art Center. It's an interesting course; the students are challenged to choose a brand; identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and then come up with a number of products to strengthen it. They are also asked to do a competitive analysis and demographics study, as well as come up with a load of interesting, innovative, and realistic products. Not easy.

It was interesting to see the amount of work that is asked of a student at the top-rated art and design school, which is super, super expensive ($17,000 a term?). Most of the works we saw were quite thought out and well executed, and obviously took many sleepless nights. As for the rare exception... well, there's a reason why students are in school and not out in the real world yet. No matter how much tuition you pay or how good the school is, it's still true that you only get what you put into anything.

And this is no insult to the students, but more of a warning: I think we work twice as hard on the mag as any of them...