August 26, 2021 | Interviewed by Erica Hur

Legendary industrial designer and entrepreneur Robert Brunner has produced innovative industry-changing designs that are instantly recognizable worldwide. As founder of the Ammunition Design Group, he has spearheaded design for industry titans including Beats by Dre, Polaroid Corporation, Lyft and Adobe Systems. The former Director of Industrial Design at Apple designed iconic products such as the Powerbook, and as a partner at Pentagram, he led industrial design and strategic branding for Fortune 500 companies. His designs are included in the permanent collections of some of the nation’s most prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA and Cooper Hewitt Museum.

In Part One of this two part interview, Brunner offers valuable insights to aspiring designers about the design process, his inspiration and more...

You’ve collaborated with top companies to design iconic products such as the Mac PowerBook, Beats headphones, and more. Could you describe what the design process is like? 

I am not a huge process person, but I also believe in process. It's important so it's kind of an interesting thing for me. I think things can get over processed and if you follow too much of a particular order of events every time you can get into doing the same thing every time.  

When I start on something, I have ideas. Right at the beginning I know what I'm interested in, but I put those down on paper and set them aside. Many times I come back to that and do that, but I like to gather information and build context around what this thing is, or what this problem is, or the people who are using it. I just build a framework to understand and then I go back to exploration and look at those original ideas. I like to look pretty broadly. I think sometimes I drive my team crazy because I always keep pushing them to look at things in a different direction. I always like this notion of when you're developing an idea, you create some things and put them down on paper and build models; then you take a 180 degree turn and go in the other direction and see what happens. Those preconceptions in your mind, sometimes they're dead on and sometimes they just don't work and lead you down the wrong path. But that's what I do when I explore. 

Then I really love to model things. I've always been very impatient from a doodle to a model, because I think [modeling is] the only way you can start to understand what you have. Early in my career, before we had a lot of 3D modeling tools and 3D printing, you tended to work in 2D for a long time. I had some real failures because by the time you got to building something, a lot of time had gone by, a lot of investment had been made, and it turned out that what you wanted to do actually didn't work or it just wasn't right. So I like to build models a lot. I like to then take that work and present it in context to partners, with people and in its environment.

Part of the design process that people don't understand or don't put enough importance on is that it's actually a social process. You're bringing other people along with you, whether it’s the people helping you build this thing, or the clients who are paying for this thing. You have to bring people along. So I spend a thorough amount of time contextualizing and making people understand the potential of what we're doing here. It really is important to get everyone on board and follow your direction or you'll never get it done. Build and refine, test and evaluate, develop and implement - I mean that's the pretty standard thing, but I think I go through and just keep refining. One thing about industrial design is that many times it's the art of managing compromise. As you get to build something in mass production, there are all these implications, requirements, and all the things that come in so you're constantly trying to manage these concepts against it and keep it intact. A lot of it is figuring out how you deal with information and make those small compromises that won't degrade the design that you have - that's the process for me. 

How do you know when you’ve nailed the right design? 

As far as knowing whether it's right, I think you can do a lot of evaluation, but honestly, a lot of times it's a gut feeling. You know it's there. You look at the design against the requirements, you have people look at it, evaluate it and test it; but again, back to my bit of skepticism on process, a lot of it is just knowing what's right.  Part of that comes from experience and part of that comes from intuition. I tend to show my stuff to a lot of people and I think sometimes it confuses them. I'll have an idea and I'll show it to one of our interns just to see what they think and they're like "What are you asking me for?" Sometimes I'm interested in what people say and sometimes I just like to hear myself describe it to see if it resonates. But the point is that I'm not asking people to decide, I just compile my own feelings about it by showing and talking about it. 

Where do you find your design inspiration?  

Mostly in the world around me. Sometimes it's another object I see. It may have nothing to do with the thing I'm working on, but there’s just something about it that's really intriguing. Sometimes it's a building. I'm always very influenced by architecture. I'm a bit of a closet architect so I'm always looking at structures and finding those that inspire me. Many times it's people – just in terms of watching people and seeing what they do and how they do it, and how they live their lives. There's always a lot of inspiration to be found there.  

What I tend to do is I have these ideas or have some form and store it away. I was working on something recently and there's this form I've had in my head for like decades. I stored it away as something I was fascinated with and finally found this application for it. It's really just the world, the things around you, and drawing inspiration from different aspects of it. 

Sometimes you've already designed something. For instance, I have done a lot of headphones and when I see people wearing them, I watch them and what they're doing with them. That inspires ideas for the next one and how it can be better or how it can look better on them. I think it's just being observant. 

One of the most important attributes a designer can have is empathy. You can as an individual put yourself in someone else's shoes and really take that on - that's always inspiration when you're starting to work on a project. Identify who the audience really is and then you can in a way put yourself in their lives and try to see things through their eyes. That's always a huge source of inspiration. 

You’re both a designer and founder of companies — what are some of the similarities and differences between the two roles? 

There are some similarities, but they're mostly different. One of the things that's similar is that being a founder really takes commitment, perseverance, vision, and creativity. If you're going to start a company, you have to be creative, you have to have a vision about where you want it to end up, at least to start. Then this really maniacal perseverance that you're going to make it happen. There are always so many challenges and so many things to learn and you just need to keep going. Some things translate to design at a higher level. But as an entrepreneur, there are so many things you have to do and understand. You’re kind of adopting this position of master of none. You know a lot of things, but you know how to hire people to get to do the very specific thing.  

There’s one thing that's consistent and it kind of relates to me. My wife tells me often that I'm a "manifester." I have some idea and I'm hellbent to realize it. Whether that's building our house or starting a business or designing a product. I think that's one skill that translates from what designers have to business – that ability to manifest something. I think it's a requirement as an entrepreneur. I think almost anyone can be an entrepreneur, but you have to be able to harness your ability to manifest something from thoughts to reality and be really really committed to doing that. 

Technology is constantly changing. What’s the most important skill for designers today and tomorrow? 

It's one of those things that I think is pretty evergreen. It's never changing to me – the ability and vision to translate requirements, needs, or opportunities into something beautiful, useful, or desirable. It's always that ability to look at the information and then figure out how to translate it into something. I mentioned empathy and I think that's still really important. So many times as a designer you design things for yourself. You think, "well, I would really like that” or “this fits my life" and then sometimes it doesn't translate. You have to have that empathy. Observation and learning are also important skills as a designer.

I think one of the big challenges is the idea of simplification. The conundrum with simplification is “simple” is actually very hard when you get to technology. It's really easy to make assumptions about people's understanding of how things work. But it's important to go through that process of understanding how people are going to use it and always work on this notion of "I'm going to simplify it to its core level to make it understandable for people." I've seen so many products fail that were really amazing pieces of technology, potentially transformative, but they never got off the ground because people couldn't understand it, or figure out how to integrate it into their lives, or even how to turn it on. So I think that's one of the most important skills a designer can have today. 

Read Part II of Robert Brunner's interview where he shares career advice, why he hired Apple's most iconic designer Jony Ive in the 1990s, and the backstory on designing IYA's original t-shirt.

*This interview has been edited for clarity.

Legendary industrial designer and entrepreneur Robert Brunner has produced innovative industry-changing designs that are instantly recognizable worldwide. In Part One of this two part interview, Brunner offers valuable insights to aspiring designers about his thoughts on the design process, his inspiration and more...

Interview with a Design Legend: Robert Brunner, Part I