QOR360

LEGENDARY INTERVIEW

Design Legends ("DL") had the distinct honour to interview legendary designer QOR360 ("QOR360") for their original perspective and innovative approach to design as well as their creative lifestyle, we are very pleased to share our interview with our distinguished readers.

DL: Could you please tell us a bit about your design background and education?

QOR360 : I’m not a designer by training; mostly I'm a designer by trial and error. I’m retired academic trauma surgeon turned research epidemiologist. I have the usual academic trauma surgeon back story: BA Neurobiology (Princeton), MD (Medical College of Virginia), surgical residency (Columbia, Harvard), fellowship (University of New Mexico). But after 20 years as a surgeon I fell off the usual career track and got a masters in Biostatistics,and an NIH grant; I abandoned the operating room to embark on a decade long study the epidemiology of traumatic injury. At some point in all this I developed low back pain, and I was frustrated that neither the medical community nor the alternative medical community seemed to have much idea of what the problem was, let alone what could be done about it. Eventually I became convinced that our modern chair centric lifestyle was largely to blame, so I began my quest for a healthier way to sit. It took a few years, but eventually I landed on a completely different way to sit based upon a new geometric solid, the Eccentric Bicylinder. This shape makes the chair's surface slightly unstable, and thus allows, actually requires, people to subtly but constantly adjust and readjust their posture while sitting. The effect is to transform sitting from a passive slump to an active exploration of posture. This is helpful because the muscular effort involved in active sitting not only improves posture and alertness, but also strengthens the core musculature and increases basal metabolic rate. Sitting becomes more like walking, just the activity that humans are designed for.

DL: What motivates you to design in general, why did you become a designer?

QOR360 : I didn't so much want to design as I wanted to solve a very specific problem. I knew there had to be a healthier way to sit than the sorts of chairs that are currently on offer. This conviction ultimately led me to discover a new geometric solid that has become the core technology (pun intended) of our active chairs. The need to actually produce a chair that was handsome enough for people to want was what led me to the craft of designing.

DL: Did you choose to become a designer, or you were forced to become one?

QOR360 : I guess I'd say that I was one of the few designers you'll meet who was forced to become a designer. I'd became obsessed with finding a better solution to the sitting problem, and once I hit on the solution, I had to then design a chair that embodied the solution. But, while I'm an unintentional designer, I confess that I find it the most fulfilling thing I've done in a long career.

DL: What do you design, what type of designs do you wish to design more of?

QOR360 : We are on a mission to change the way the world sits. We are constantly iterating on our designs and coming up with new ways to accomplish the goal of getting everyone to sit actively. We’ve seen an overwhelming response to our children’s chair, the ButtOn Chair, and we think the approach of having the entire family hooked on active sitting is important.

DL: What should young designers do to become a design legend like you?

QOR360 : Pick an important problem and be willing to fail. Having a vision that engages other people is also essential. You really only need a handful of people to believe in your idea, but they have to be the right people; your team may need to evolve as your design evolves.

DL: What distinguishes between a good designer and a great designer?

QOR360 : Believing that what you do is important; no, make that believing what you’re doing is essential.

DL: What makes a good design a really good design, how do you evaluate good design?

QOR360 : I want to be sure it achieves what the designer set out to do with a minimum of fuss and wasted motion and material. I also appreciate when it’s something unique enough to make you stop and think: “How did they come up with that?”.

DL: What is the value of good design? Why should everyone invest in good design?

QOR360 : The value of good design is that it brings pleasure to every day. Any teapot will make tea, but some teapots will make making tea a pleasure

DL: What would you design and who would you design for if you had the time?

QOR360 : I'd like to make a chair for one of the executives at "Big Chair", say James Keane, the CEO of Steelcase. If we could get "Big Chair" to embrace the idea that chairs could actually be good for people, well, I'd save myself about 10 years of effort. I hope James sees this and gives me a call.

DL: What is the dream project you haven’t yet had time to realize?

QOR360 : I want to blow mold an active chair. I think this could create an amazing chair for schools that would be so inexpensive to make we could almost give them away.

DL: What is your secret recipe of success in design, what is your secret ingredient?

QOR360 : The secret recipe is to have a committed team of people who share your vision, and the secret ingredient is to find a way to keep each member of the team working to their full capacity.

DL: Who are some other design masters and legends you get inspired from?

QOR360 : Da Vinci is really the design master for the ages, because world view was all encompassing: human anatomy, architecture, art, it was all a single seamless reality for him. Because his view took in everything, it seemed to him that everything was possible. If we're discussing legends, well Archimedes would be my guy, because his view was so solidly based on a mathematical view of reality. He saw deeply beneath the skin of the world, and so he was able to imagine things unimagined. More lately, Peter Opsvik's playful, try anything, approach that is still informed by the actual requirements of the human body has been a source of inspiration for me.

DL: What are your favorite designs by other designers, why do you like them?

QOR360 : I've long favored analog controls for appliances, but these have disappeared in favor of much less useful digital buttons that require many button presses rather than, say, simply turning a knob that sets a timer or a volume level. So, I was delighted to find a microwave oven that has a digital touch "slider bar" that lets one select how long for the oven to run by simply sliding one's finger along a line; no detour into digital counts of minutes and seconds required. I don't know the designer, but I hope he or she keeps at it. We may not be able to escape our digital fate, but with good design we may survive it.

DL: What is your greatest design, which aspects of that design makes you think it is great?

QOR360 : I think our Ariel chair is our most successful design to date. It's an honor to be recognized by A’Design for it. We think it will be the perfect chair for most people who must sit, every day, hours at a time.

DL: How could people improve themselves to be better designers, what did you do?

QOR360 : Design is a contact sport. Find an area where you think you can make a contribution and go hard. How to become a better designer? Make it a practice to first understand clearly the problem that you are trying to solve. Then, learn from every success, and learn even more from every failure. These successes and failures don't have to be yours personally: study history and you can learn almost as much with far less anxiety.

DL: If you hadn’t become a designer, what would you have done?

QOR360 : Actually, here's a question I can answer with complete certainty. I would have been a surgeon if I weren't a designer. I know this because I was an academic trauma surgeon and epidemiologist for the 35 years before I became a designer.

DL: How do you define design, what is design for you?

QOR360 : To me, design is putting what we want to see in the world, out into the world. Design is about functionality and problem solving, not just about looking good. It’s about helping people. It’s about fixing problems that people perhaps don’t even know they have.

DL: Who helped you to reach these heights, who was your biggest supporter?

QOR360 : My family has been my biggest support system. I run QOR360 with my son, Lex as the COO, and my wife has been incredibly supportive of our project over the years.

DL: What helped you to become a great designer?

QOR360 : I wanted to build the perfect active chair. So I drew on my academic training and resources, spent time at academic ergonomic conferences, and studied every active chairs, and every ergonomic chair I could find. I also compulsively read the relatively thin medical literature on sitting and sitting disease. I felt it was important to know what was known before setting out to try to improve on our notion of what sitting was.

DL: What were the obstacles you faced before becoming a design master?

QOR360 : There was a lot of trial and error, iterations that didn't work, but over time, we took them as learning opportunities rather than failures.

DL: How do you think designers should present their work?

QOR360 : Earnestly. It can sometimes take a push from my team to talk about what we’ve accomplished, because I still see this as a little chair project. But over time, it’s begun to feel like this is my life's work. And just in the nick of time. I spent most of my life thinking I was a surgeon, but now late in life I've discovered that all along I was a designer.

DL: What’s your next design project, what should we expect from you in future?

QOR360 : We’re focusing on our ButtOn Chair now. It was originally created to be downloadable for a CNC router, giving individuals and school districts the ability to create dozens of these chairs at a cost of about $7 per unit, from plywood, bungee cord and a lacrosse ball. We realized that most people don’t have access to a CNC router, especially during quarantine, so we created a hand tools version. When people expressed that they didn’t have access to hand tools to build it, we found a company to create a build-your-own kit. We want the future of active sitting to start with kids, because they are free of preconceptions.

DL: What’s your ultimate goal as a designer?

QOR360 : We want everyone to be sitting actively as soon as possible. Passive sitting represents a public health crisis, much as smoking was in the 1950's and 1960's. This is a problem that can't wait.

DL: What people expect from an esteemed designer such as yourself?

QOR360 : I hope my ideas continue to flow. Creativity is hard to define or quantify, so it's difficult to be sure that one's well of ideas doesn't run dry. The best prophylaxis is to stay part of the conversation and hope that new ideas and collaborators continue to emerge.

DL: How does design help create a better society?

QOR360 : It takes one person to question conventional wisdom and start a shift toward a better way of doing things. Having a good design can inspire people to accept the change and build upon it.

DL: What are you currently working on that you are especially excited about?

QOR360 : We’re excited to continue with the ButtOn Chair project, and we have a few different designs in the works as well. I have a design in mind for an active chair that could be blow molded from old milk containers, but a prototype will be costly, so we're proceeding carefully. Sometimes you want to be pretty sure before going all in. Unless we were to find an angel investor…

DL: Which design projects gave you the most satisfaction, why?

QOR360 : Getting our Ariel chair to the place it is today was incredibly satisfying, and to get an award for it is an incredible honor!

DL: What would you like to see changed in design industry in the coming years?

QOR360 : I think seeing young designers taking risks and applying what they know from their respective fields of study and experiences will be very interesting.

DL: Where do you think the design field is headed next?

QOR360 : I hope it goes the way of accessibility. Similar to how we made the ButtOn Chair available for download, the open source method can continue to inspire people all over the world at a low cost.

DL: How long does it take you to finalize a design project?

QOR360 : Months to years; it just depends.

DL: When you have a new design project, where do you start?

QOR360 : Start with why. If you know why you’re doing a project, most of the rest of it will fall into place.

DL: What is your life motto as a designer?

QOR360 : Start simple; you can always complexify later. Almost always you're going for simpler, so, if you can start simple you'll save a good deal of time.

DL: Do you think design sets the trends or trends set the designs?

QOR360 : I think good designers follow trends, but great designers create trends. We're going for great.

DL: What is the role of technology when you design?

QOR360 : I always start simple: cutting out cardboard, or bending pipe cleaners, any quick way to physically interact with a design. Ultimately to communicate ideas we need CAD design and 3D printing and all that stuff, but in the early stages simple and quick trumps perfect every time. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”.

DL: What kind of design software and equipment do you use in your work?

QOR360 : We use a mix of physical, household items like cardboard and pipe cleaners, and then move on to CAD design and 3D printing once we’ve developed a concept we think might work.

DL: What is the role of the color, materials and ambient in design?

QOR360 : Red is widely known as the color of energy, passion and action. It’s quite fitting for our active chair and our passion for changing the way the world sits.

DL: What do you wish people to ask about your design?

QOR360 : I want people to ask “Why does your chair move?” It’s the obvious question, of course, but as Nietzsche observed, “He who has answered why has answered almost every how.” Our chairs are unlike anything anyone has seen, and I think that can be good and bad. “How do I get one” is a question that we love to hear, of course, but “Why” is where the best conversations start.

DL: When you see a new great design or product what comes into your mind?

QOR360 : HOW did they do that? Is their process anything at all like mine? I wish we could talk.

DL: Who is your ideal design partner? Do you believe in co-design?

QOR360 : I started this company with my son, Lex, who acts as the COO. Design is an intimate affair, and so Lex and I have pitched battles over most aspects of design until a solution emerges and we can’t quite remember who was pushing for which part of the solution. We call it “collaboration”, but to outsiders it might look more like a contact sport. So, while I think of design as a solitary pursuit, finding the best design seems to require collaboration, sometimes verging on conflict. Once we get to a prototype, we pass it around to our panel of testers, including of MD’s, designers and body work experts, as well as people from the worlds of Feldenkrais, yoga, Tai Chi, AT, and Rolfers. They all come from different traditions, but they’re all figuring out how the human body interacts with the world. When it comes to actually manufacturing a chair the project becomes much obviously collaborative; then it’s a matter of having enough nuts and bolts, and enough boxes, and software that can keep up with orders. At that point, it’s just “busy-ness”, but essential if we’re to get active sitting out into the world.

DL: Which people you interacted had the most influence on your design?

QOR360 : Our maker community here in Burlington, Vermont, has a wealth of folks with skills and energy, but I was very lucky to meet Eric Cooper and Matt Flego early in my design career. These guys had real design chops and could see that I was way out of my depth but were kind enough to say something like “Dr. let us help you.” This made all the difference.

DL: Which books you read had the most effect on your design?

QOR360 : Darwin’s big idea of evolution, iterative design that optimizes a solution unbidden, has long seemed to me how the best designs are achieved. I’m interested in the history of chair design, of course, (Galen Cranz book The Chair comes to mind, and many others), but it’s the evolution of the chair that really interests me.

DL: How did you develop your skills as a master designer?

QOR360 : It was a lot of trial and error and consulting with people who are masters in their fields to collaborate on a truly innovative project.

DL: Irrelative of time and space, who you would want to meet, talk and discuss with?

QOR360 : Newton’s fascination with calculus, astronomy, optics and alchemy has long puzzled me. How could the greatest scientific mind of all time pursue turning lead into gold? I want to know how he thought about this problem, how he thought it was even an option.

DL: How do you feel about all the awards and recognition you had, is it hard to be famous?

QOR360 : I still see this as our small, Vermont-based chair project, so I wouldn’t say we’re famous just yet. But the recognition we’ve received is greatly appreciated and encourages us in thinking that this idea just might not be too far-fetched. It’s not enough to have a great idea; you have to have a great idea that people like.

DL: What is your favorite color, place, food, season, thing and brand?

QOR360 : Color = grey, place = Volcan Atitlan’s lake, food = anything with more olive oil and garlic than other people think proper, season = winter, thing = Aikido, brand = canine (dogs have been getting it right for 32,000 years, fitting in with any group and getting people to be better than they actually are.)

DL: Please tell us a little memoir, a funny thing you had experienced as a designer?

QOR360 : We took one of our early designs to a trade show, really more of a stool than a chair, and really not much of a stool. It was a squat thing with a rocker hidden under the seat. Hundreds of people streamed by, and not one of them stopped to try out our fabulously improved way of sitting. Crestfallen, I asked a passerby to try our chair out. He looked at me and responded “Chair? I thought it was a planter.” Note to self: don’t get too far ahead of your audience; they have to at least know what you’re going for.

DL: What makes your day great as a designer, how do you motivate yourself?

QOR360 : I love hearing from our customers how they love our design. Even better, I love hearing that our chair has changed their lives. It makes it easy to keep pushing along to get these chairs into the hands of as many people as possible.

DL: When you were a little child, was it obvious that you would become a great designer?

QOR360 : I had the usual little child penchant for taking things apart; putting things together not so much. I showed early aptitude for math and science and was interested in medicine by the time I was around 6 years old, but otherwise I was pretty normal. I don’t think anyone pegged me for an inventor, but then I patented a new slide rule design when I was in junior high school. At that point people started looking at me a little differently.

DL: What do you think about future; what do you see will happen in thousand years from now?

QOR360 : A thousand years from now we will have solved some critical problems (climate change, nuclear disarmament, over population, living together peaceably), or we will pretty much be back to hunting and gathering. Bertrand Russel famously observed that once the light of civilization goes out we won’t be able to rekindle it, and I agree with his assessment. Right now, I’d give these two scenarios about equal probability. I don’t think we really realize just how precarious our situation is.

DL: Please tell us anything you wish your fans to know about you, your design and anything else?

QOR360 : We’ve gone to some effort to create an entirely new way of sitting, but our project can’t be considered a success unless active sitting becomes the default way people sit. This is a heavy lift, because most people already know what a chair is, or at least think they do. We’re grateful to have an audience that thrives on new ideas and new stuff. We’re hopeful that being recognized by A’Design will help bring active sitting to the attention of the world.