For Mighty Studios Founder and Director, Tark Abed, the path from a Bay Area kid drawing spaceships at the kitchen table to launching a leading product design consultancy has always been guided by the pursuit of passions. In Tark’s case, one of those passions happened to be skateboarding which, as he explains in a recent interview with Before it Happened podcast host, Donna Loughlin, has more in common with the design process than you might think. The constant tweaking of form leads to the eventual nailing of the trick—or in a business case, the successful creation and launch of a product, something Mighty Studios prides itself on.
“Skateboarding, failing, getting back up again, doing it differently, learning, and moving forward. It’s sort of a metaphor for life, but it’s also a pretty powerful metaphor for the design process.” – Tark Abed
In this far-ranging interview, Tark takes us back to where he began, walking us through the many turns in his life that led him to industrial design, plus many of the products, innovations, and clients that got him fired up along the way. But as Tark also illustrates, while it may be exciting to realize that things that you visualize on paper can become real, a critical key to success is the realization that it doesn’t end there. Mighty Studios is a key partner in educating and walking clients—many of them startups—through all the steps necessary to take it beyond the prototype and make that product successful.
“They’ll say: ‘Oh, we just need to get to a prototype.” I’m thinking in my head, well that’s just the first third of one-third of all of the things you need to do to bring a product to market.”
If you’ve ever wondered how a self-confessed skater kid becomes an industrial designer and founder of a dynamic product design consultancy, this is a must listen.