Sydney designers unplugged: people, process, product


Henri Spaile, Associate Design Director, BlueSky Creative,
talks about the Victa project

I became a designer because I had this interest in creative pursuits as well as technical things. I was always interested in the arts, drawing and visualising things but I was also interested in physics and the way things worked and were put together. So naturally I was attracted to design and architecture. I guess design specifically because it reaches a lot of people. It’s about creating something that’s good and then letting everyone have it. So it’s kind of almost a community thing that you are providing.

Traditionally lawnmowers had been pretty close to farm equipment. They were rudimentary they had exposed bolts and that kind of thing. We wanted to bring the lawnmower more into the modern product age where the product is integrated, easy to use, and safe, having a very high level of performance. I guess the form of the product had to show that but also the configuration and also the design of the product had to lend itself to being a functional, easy to use product and appeal to that market group which is interested in performance and usability and those kind of key features.

It’s not only how it looks, but how it feels, its weight, that kind of looking across the board at all aspects of the product that really brings the full response from the user and makes it something that people are proud to own and enjoy to use and overall increases the quality of life of the user. That’s our main aim with all our products is to increase the quality of life of people. Because otherwise our role is really just to churn out more products for commercial good but we want, we’ve got more of a human focus as well so that we in society have a reason to be here.