16|REPORTAJE Interview with María Ruiz Ulibarri, Product Designer for Lagranja By: Oscar Amela Arbonés - Architect Postgraduate Student of Product Design at the Escola Sert COAC Oscar Amela Arbonés: What is product design? What does a product designer do? María Ruiz Ulibarri:Every study is a world.Ours was born as an office of interior design where,many times, we ended up designing custom-made furniture. From this, the need to design product emerged. We are able to put those products in our interior designs and even sell them to companies and produce them. OAA: Like the armchair for the Chic & Basic Ramblas hotel in Barcelona. MRR:Exactly. And now we are making the stool, but we do not manufacture. We manage suppliers, we receive the finished product and we send it to the client. We do not want to compete with the furniture stores; we work for them. In this case, there was a product that was hard to find at a certain price – affordable armchair that meets our requirments – so we decided to produce it. OAA: How do you find work? MRU:The world of product design is very free, there are various ways to find work. You can present yourself to companies whose work you like: “I do this and I have an idea that is going to work for you...”; or maybe there is a gap in their catalogue that you can Lámpara Oslo, METALARTE; Foto: Web Lagranja fill. Another option is when somebody shows up with a briefing and tells you, for example, that he/she wants to make a kitchen hood with certain characteristics. Well you put forth your proposal. You can also enter a design contest. OAA: How much time is needed to launch a product to the market? MRU: Between a year and two years. At the end of the first year the product is usually ready but there are things that need fine-tuning: finishings, unexpected things and you are part of the process, you can get involved at many levels, even in the catalog.There are product designers who serve as art directors for design companies and they design from the chair to the catalog. They create the whole concept of the company. Designers like Alberto Lievore work with companies to the point of deciding every year if the company will do chairs or tables. The designer is versatile. Two years is too long to work for a company you are not happy with.It is aso important to have a technical support office that can assist the study and with whom you have good communication. Not having it translates into more work and above all, insecurity with unpleasant results and experiences. We are not engineers. We carry our designs so far. Designers do not know how to make motors; we do not draw templates. Specialists do that. We propose designs considering production systems. Between designers and engineers there must be a dialogue that goes back and forth looking for solutions until an agreement is reached. This way, the design does not get changed to unacceptable levels. Engineers do everything square, big and easy to unmold. We look for other things at the formal, conceptual level. It is important to have a good technical office that understands the designer; know that not everythig goes.On our part, we have to open our minds too, and accept that if something is more expensive, difficult and so on, we have to make changes. In this sense we are are open and we fight for what we think is important but sometimes, even when you are on top of things, the end result is not what you wanted. We go hand in hand with our project until it is finished. Not everybody does it. Industrial design is very conditioned by the business behind it. Publicity and Marketing are involved; it is very demanding. In this business you need endless patience. When the product is finally out, the excitement you got from it at the beginning has worn out. OAA: What is the connection between design and architecture? What links them together? What separates them? Can the architect be part of the design world? MRU: Many architects have ventured into the world of industrial design and some have actually stayed and have a trajectory and evolved products. In general, an architect has a hard time thinking the small details when he makes a product; the change of scale is brutal. The end result is always very square, very formal. We have a hard time understanding each other in our own studio. The change in scale is big. For the designer the milimeter is very important. What we design is produced as is, and one milimeter less can translate into a production problem. The architect needs someone to support him on this; someone to do the conversionsfor him. It is not a problema of capability. OAA: What should a product contribute to society? Is it always