Holistic Design: Designers make consequences. Their decisions effect people, culture, outcomes, ecosystems, resources and economies in significant ways. FaxonDesign Tools such as trend forecasting, ethnographic and market research, ideation, life cycle analysis, sustainable and ethical manufacturing, and branding help FaxonDesign transform problems into opportunities and understand the consequences of design decisions. uses a holistic design approach to understand the whole life and impact of a product. This process helps orchestrate the elements of product design including research, ideation, marketing, materials, technology, and manufacturing to form a cohesive creative process.
Abstraction: FaxonDesign employs visual and cognitive abstraction in the design process to erase preconceptions and create truly original ideas. This process combined with immersive ethnographic research explores problems at an elemental level and allows those elements to be built back into new paradigms. In this process the hypothetical becomes practical.
Design is collaboration: Product designers occupy the middle ground between engineering, production, marketing and users. To bring products to market they must link these contributors in a web of creative collaboration. FaxonDesign has a proven record in leading cross-functional collaboration through design-advocacy and empathetic consensus-building. This approach lays the foundation for bringing valuable innovative and divergent ideas to the market by inclusion and engagement of key contributors throughout the corporate process.
Design is about people: Designers make decisions that have huge impacts on people at both ends of production and use through the products they design. A designer must be deeply connected to producers as well as users in order to understand these impacts and to fully comprehend the life of a product. William Gordon, both before and after the creation of FaxonDesign, has been deeply involved in ethical and sustainable production in emerging markets around the world. During this time William has worked as a designer and a manufacturing and marketing consultant for small and large producers throughout the developing world.