Design tells the story of the future - Florentin Hortopan - S2 Ep. 2

S2 Episode 2 - Florentin Hortopan - Design tells the story of the future

Introduction

Florentin Hortopan is not a conventional design leader. Converting diverse skills to achieve success in digital design, he has redefined design strategies for cross-brand platforms, including Airbnb, GoPro, and Apple. Developing the human experience from component design to CMS design, Florentin is the Assistant Director of UX at Critical Mass. And to our surprise, he is an equally competent rhinoceros master and teacher.

 

Discussion Points

• How has the journey been, as you're not from the US originally? 01:38
• How difficult was it to maintain the inspiration during all that? How your creative juices are maintained while you are going through the hoops and loops of the bureaucracy, If I have to call it that? 07:14
• Rapid fire round questions 13:57
• There's something that was written by you and I quote, “conforming to rules, and being polite is a bad idea. For a designer, you need to be wrong and weird.” Can you please elaborate on this? 20:39
  How difficult is it to ensure that the innovation keeps happening, without alienating the existing brand of users you possess? 24:54
• What is the one piece of advice that you think you missed at the beginning of your career that you would like to give to anybody who's starting out now? 31:33

Show Notes

• In specific contexts, in specific companies and design studios around Silicon Valley, you find agency folks are being really embedded into high-level processes and design and design tasks. 06:24
• It's not about being hired necessarily by a company, it's how much value you can give to the work that you're doing to the company, to the people. It's a different take on your individual contribution to society at large.  10:42
• The main value that design can give to any product, any community, or any society is when it changes your perspective on things, it gives you a different perception of reality, and it improves your life somehow. 21:27
• In the definition, at least the old definition of design, that is this idea that you project things, you do something that is in the future, you essentially tell the story of the future. 22:57
• The main strategy here is to provide solutions that are really relevant to the user in terms of UX, you obviously try to be systemic, you try to be strategic. So UX and design need to evolve into strategy and more like a, you know, kind of a global service design practice. 25:12
• I think we sometimes don't feel like we need to innovate because we are protective of our ideas.  29:00
• The first thing to do is to immerse yourself into different challenging situations beforehand and then decide what it is. And obviously, another thing is to not consider your design practice as your career path in the future as one. You have to be open about changing every time needed and try different things on your skin. 34:11
• There is a very simple path for a lot of designers to get into school, you know, you get graduated from whatever interest in college, you get a job in design, you stay in that job for a very long time, or at least you think you're very good at it. But I think that will always, you know, prevent you from experiencing the best. 33:47

Contact

LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/florentinhortopan/
Twitter - twitter.com/panopano
Company website - criticalmass.com/
Portfolio/ website - florentin.us
Medium - medium.com/@panopano


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