Logitech Cork: The Process Doesn't Change
The Logitech visit came not long after London, and that probably shaped how I took it in. A few days earlier we'd been in Thomas Heatherwick's studio, looking at models and material experiments and drawings on the walls. Cork was a different kind of visit, and in some ways a more interesting one.
The facility is bigger than you'd expect. The design studio in particular is a lot to take in when you first walk through the door, though when we were there it was very quiet, barely anyone around.
A designer walked us through everything, which made a real difference. There's a limit to what you get from just moving through a space, having someone explain how the process actually works, what their own route into the industry looked like, that's the part that sticks. They covered a bit of everything: the design process, their role, how the company operates. Useful not just for understanding the place you're standing in, but for getting a clearer picture of what all this looks like once we’re out the other side of college.
Dotted around the studio were finished products I recognised; mice, keyboards, hardware that ends up on desks all over the world. Seeing them there, in the place the decisions were made, is different to seeing them in a shop. They stop being products and start being outcomes.
The prototyping lab was the highlight. The 3D printers were running, which helped, there's more to learn from a machine doing something than one sitting idle. Getting to handle the models was better still. Weight, surface finish, the way a grip resolves where your thumb sits. Things a render won't tell you.
What I hadn't anticipated was the clay. They model in clay at Logitech, the same way we do in college, for the same reasons. Alongside the CNC machines and the printers, there it was. It makes complete sense when you think about it, but seeing it in a professional environment, at a company shipping hardware to millions of people, was still a surprise. Some parts of the process don't change because they don't need to.
Going in I think I expected something more corporate, more managed. There's a version of a company visit that feels like a presentation of work rather than the work itself. This didn't feel like that. And the thing that's hard to get across in a lecture or a brief is that the gap between college and a place like that is mostly just time. The methods are the same.
