Michael Colley

Like most people in design I’ve loved the fundamentals of design from day one. As a small child I spent my time drawing pictures on Microsoft Paint, in school I had more doodles on my notes than words, and my free time was spent in the shed taking apart then building anything and everything. In high school I thought I wanted to be an engineer but hated doing math. It wasn’t until the end of high school that my mom brought up the idea of Industrial Design. When reading off the description of it, the second she mentioned problem solving I knew it was for me. My passions for art and building have been and still are revolving around problem solving. To me all of design is a problem, wether thats the problem of how it looks, what it solves, or how we interact with it; when you get down to it, it’s all just a puzzle to solve. I constantly find myself stepping back and realizing what it is that I'm doing. Everyday I’m dumbfounded that for a degree and a career, I get to sketch. The things that I used to do for enjoyment my whole life I get to do it for my job. So it’s very easy to be passionate about Industrial Design when all it requires is to keep loving the things I’ve always loved to do.

Instead of improving a current solution I always try to to come up with a new way of approaching the problem entirely. Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean it should be, which is sort of my design philosophy if you will. Without stepping back and really looking at the way things are, you can never plan for how they should be.