Portfolio Review

Hey guys! This is my first time posting on Core77. I’m currently a graduating senior at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Didn’t really know about the discussion boards here until I met Michael DiTullo a few days back at my school.

Some of my work is at www.fienawu.com ! Any suggestions on storytelling or anything would be great!

Thanks!
Fiena Wu

Hi Fiena, it was nice to meet you at CIA yesterday. I’m glad you posted your portfolio here and I’m looking forward to reading what others think of it. You have some strong work. I’ll take a second look through it tomorrow and will let you know if I see anything other than what we talked about in person.

Hi Fiena, nice to see your work here.

You are a strong industrial designer with good concepting abilities. In some of your projects, especially with the stool design, I see a tendency that you stick to one idea or line of thought too much without especially explaining why you did this. As a designer you need to have this urge of finding just that right solution that fits the specific aspects of the context, and research this very thoroughly. Some of your ideas are not very original or realistic, while others are great and quite decently researched. I also want to see proof of your ideas’ functioning and desirability, you can do this with a test at the end of your projects providing both qualitative and quantitative results. In terms of storytelling you could go deeper by designing not just for practical value but focusing more on higher biopsychosocial needs. See for example Maslow’s pyramid. You start designing social behavior, human interactions and experiences enabled by your product rather than the product as the core of your projects.