Gordon Bruce
Gordon Bruce is the owner of Gordon Bruce Design LLC. He has been a design consultant for over 45 years, working with various multinational enterprises, such as IBM, Mobil and GE, in the US, Europe and Asia. His impressive portfolio includes product design, interior design, furniture, supercomputers, medical devices and even aircraft. In addition to his practice, Gordon Bruce was a vice president for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, when he was asked to help open a campus in Kyoto from 1991 to 1994. Next, he co-developed the unique “Innovative Design Lab of Samsung” (IDS) in Seoul. He served there as the chairman of product design from 1995 to 1999. In 2003, he was hired to participate in the establishment of Porsche Design’s North American office. For many years, Gordon Bruce served as the head design consultant at the Lenovo Innovation Design Center (IDC) in Beijing, for clients including Bühler in Switzerland, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. in China and OSIM in Singapore.
Gordon Bruce shares his knowledge and experience with the younger generation as a visiting professor at universities in the US and China. He has also authored books for Phaidon Press in London and contributed articles to various international design magazines, such as AXIS in Japan. Some of Gordon’s designs have been exhibited and selected for permanent design collections at prestigious establishments like MoMA (New York), the Smithsonian (Washington, DC), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA). In recognition of his contributions, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Center College of Design. Recently, he has been a regular lecturer in Harvard University’s Master in Design Engineering programme.
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.