The wonderful Sadhbh is Product Manager / Designer at the fantastic Tech Will Save Us. We had the pleasure of working with Sadhbh a few years ago on the Mover Kit, and she’s gone on to lead development on loads of new products at the kids tech startup. Just before Christmas we got the chance to chat with Sadhbh about her work, and what to expect in the future.
Tell us about yourself and what you do at Tech Will Save Us.
I've been living in London for the past five years. I came over from Ireland to do an MA at the RCA and have been working at Tech Will Save Us for the last four of those. My background before Tech Will Save Us was quite varied doing everything from exhibition design to costume design which has influenced the work I do and how I go about it. I'm a product manager and designer and I see all of the Tech Will Save Us new products through their entire development from first glimmer of an idea to a product on a shelf that someone takes home (with a great team of people of course). I'll generally be working on four products at a time although they'll be at different stage of their journey.
Over the year or so it takes to see a product through from end to end I'll be working out the viability of a product with people from across the team. Creating concepts and prototypes with the product team, user testing in schools and homes with children, working with the marketing team to create solid positioning and testing to make sure it resonates. We make sure the components and processes we're using fit the budgets and estimated retail price we have. Then designing the product for manufacture, creating the engineering files, then heading over the China to work with our suppliers. Then making sure everything is in place to launch our product alongside our online experiences. There's always a lot going on and it can be a challenge but it's a really rewarding and as I've already mentioned we have a great team of people.
When designing a product, what’s your approach? Where does the inspiration come from?
We've spent a lot of time creating a process for product design that takes us from idea right through to the product sitting on a shelf. This keeps us focussed but open enough for as much creativity from the team as possible. We begin each project with a loose brief that identifies the price point, how it fits within our range and a wide theme like wearables or craft. From there we get input from around the business; our sales team might have picked up on retail trends, or the dev team may have been playing with a new technology; we take those and begin to create concepts around them. We like to get hands on as fast as possible so will make prototypes and get user testing to see what's working and what gets kids excited. It's really from there that our products begin to form. It's not one big lightning flash but twenty smaller ones that grow into a product we know kids will love.
“ It’s not one big lightning flash but twenty smaller ones that grow into a product we know kids will love.”
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In your spare time do you make + create things, if so any projects we should know about?
I do so much making and creating at work that the things I make at home are really personal things like embroidering t-shirts I want to wear or sketching little illustrations of angry people, I went through a cross stitch phase a while ago that I somewhat regret, at the moment I'm learning to propagate plants. There are a few larger design projects beginning to brew in the background with friends so ask me again this time next year and I might have something to show off.
What’s your favourite design + tech project you’ve seen this year, and why do you love it?
People are doing such great things at the moment. There are incredible things happening with recycled materials, there are robots building robots, there are amazing humanitarian projects happening but my favourites this year are the silly things people are doing with AI. I think it's always important to have a bit of fun with new tech and helps to inspire new ways of thinking about a technology and widen its scope. The highlights for me are the beatboxing AI that live battles a human beat boxer by creating samples from their voice and Pix2Pix which uses TensorFlow to create "realistic" drawings of cats, shoes and Pikachu's from your chicken scratches. Here's a terrifying cat I made today:
What song motivates you while you’re working and why?
I have a weird habit when I need to be particularly focussed of playing the same song on repeat for hours, days or even weeks at a time. I'm not sure it's the healthiest thing but it keeps me on task. The last song to get the repeat treatment was Die Young by Sylvan Esso. It's a great song, maybe just don't play it for two weeks straight.