World-Class Industrial Desi gner Finds A Home That Lacked His Caliber

Leonardo da Vinci "has used all his acquired science of linear and aerial perspective to create an almost complete illusion to the eye, but an illusion that has in it nothing trivial."
---From a critic of "The Last Supper"

"As a day well spent gives joyful sleep, so does a life well spent, give joyful death."
---Leonardo

"Excellent!"
---Bill and Ted

Before one writes about Vladymir Rogov, it helps to read a good biography about Leonardo and watch a bad movie called "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," lest the modern journalist forget what a mere mortal could do 500 years ago or what George Carlin could pull off in the future.

Given this perspective, one should not be overly impressed that Vladymir Rogov, lead singer for ARK I TEX, Opened for the B-52's and Talking Heads in 1980.

And one shouldn't be too impressed that Vladymir Rogov, a San Diegan since 1984, was ranked among the best industrial designers in the U.S. last year. Had Leonardo been around, he probably would not have out-designed Vladymir who maintains offices of ROGOV Corporation at 6162 Nancy Ridge Dr., Suite 101. Leonardo doesn't.

Born to Russian parents along the West German border three years after the close of World War II, Vladymir Rogov learned early ho to make do. Russians were not loved in Germany.

Garbage Products

"There wasn't any food, any toys, any clothes," he recalls. "I would just make things. My first experience with things and products was going down to the garbage dump.

"It was a beautiful sunny day, and there was a pond at the bottom of the dump. And I saw all this garbage thrown out by the Germans, flashlights, bicycle wheels, a razor. We didn't have those things. They looked like products. I would get a piece of wood and whittle. I made a crossbow or a wooden knife. Pretty soon I was making a go-cart and took it home.

"We had a one-room place with seven kids and if you put a go-cart in that, there was not room to close the door. My mother threw it out.

"I built another one the following day, based on what I learned the day before. She threw it out. I started getting pretty good at building these things."

At age 11, Rogov got a scholarship that took him to England, where he eventually studied mechanical engineering at a technical college and later three-dimensional design at the Guilford School of Art. His dream of owning a guitar was fulfilled at age 15 when he went to a music store, traced on paper the design of a guitar he liked, bought a piece of wood and began shaping it.

Impressing The Girls

"A month or so later, I plugged it in and it worked! I remember the first song I played on the guitar was `In Dreams' by Roy Orbison. This girl at the school was listening to me and said, "Every time you sing that song we all hold our breath, as you you reach those high notes."

Rogov found mechanical engineering "a dry world," he being particularly interested in the external appearance of things. He earned a diploma in 3-D design in three years, moved to London, "a big city," and began work for Terrence Conran, one of the biggest industrial designers then and now. "He'd get a lot of good design projects and let the young designers do them. Soon I was designing a lot of consumer products, almost anything, cigarette lighters, spoons, ashtrays, kitchenware.

"By 1985 then, I'd been in England about 16 years and I thought I was English. I wanted to see more of the world. If you're in England, you have sort of a tight view of the world. I thought of going to Italy and become a sort of esoteric Italian designer and speak a about the "quality of life", you know what I mean?

"Or I could go to the "New World" - North America. I had some friends in Canada and they said, "Why don't you come?' I said, `Fine.'"

Working Hard, Feeling Used

And so he wound up in Toronto teaching and working for Kuypers Adamson & Norton, a good design firm, "but I was still very young and felt that I was doing all the teaching there. About design anyway. The products were good. As far as the people, I won't talk about them."

With Kuypers he designed the interior and seating for the Aston Martin Lagonda, bathroom vanity products for Boeing Canada, coolers for Coleman Co., self-serve gas stations for Exxon, recreation trailers for Monarch, furniture for Krug and so on.

"I met Glenda in the summer of 1977. I was 29. She was a youthful 21. She was on holiday from McGill University in Montreal where she was studying neurology and psychology. She served me a beer and there was something about her voice that sounded so familiar. Her hair was short and she had long, graceful hands. She was slender with long legs and long feet. All her movements seemed in slow motion. She looked so wholesome.

"I'm a visual observer and am very aware those things. (It seemed like) we'd known each other for a long time; there were a lot of things between us."

Becoming a Musician

As the 1970s merged into the '80's, Rogov spent more time with music and less with design, though he worked on projects well into the '80's - more coolers for Canadian Coleman, Furniture for Croydon and Krug, as well as projects like beauty Salons.

His performance high point was probably Aug. 23, 1980, at the Heat Wave concert in Toronto, featuring the B-52's, Talking Heads, the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Rockpile, and a local opening group, ARK I TEX, new wave punks with lead singer and guitarist Vladymir Rogov in a blue sweat suit, the rest of the band in gray sweat suits.

And they sang:

"I gotta job at the computer factory.

"Exactly what I do has never bothered me.

"I feel at home with my computerized toys.

"Don't need to get around,

"Nor do the rest of the boys.

"This ain't no hick town."

Rogov wrote the music and the lyrics, but don't hold that against him.

Impressing Stevie Wonder

By the spring of 1983, ARK I TEX had put out a record, about the same time Rogov hit a musical design high point: His electronic synthesizer had won a Canadian national design award. "Stevie Wonder put his hands on (the synthesizer) and said, `Man, I sure love the looks of this,'" Rogov remembers.

" ARK I TEX was a designer's experiment," says Rogov. "Once I did that, I'd proven my own point to myself, that that kind of world wasn't the be-all, end-all. I live from a context of the design world. People at the top (of various professions) they make similar incomes. They sort of mingle. I wanted to be in the top category in design. Music, the harmony of music, is very expressive and communicative, it is still an element that drives my design and is a strong catalyst in in the design process."

Sick of the rain and cold of Toronto, Rogov looked for a warm climate, a laboratory with plenty of commerce that needed "a designer of my caliber." He and Glenda married and moved to San Diego in 1984 and discovered "absolutely nothing we were used to in terms of a city structure, or a structure of any kind. There was just a beach and a few spotted suburbs. After three months, we stopped going to the beach."

Not A Specialist

"I like being a San Diego designer now. There isn't anybody here who can offer the broad and intimate kind of cultural experiences that I bring.

There are specialists. The Nissan designers do motor cars all the time, that's it. They huddle and speculate on what is cool to others. I in turn have intimately experienced cultures and worlds that they have maybe seen on TV or dreamed of visiting on vacation. Guess I got lucky and came out with a broad vision of all kinds of needs, all kinds of products, all kinds of materials and processes and how to apply them in a very diverse way."

Since arriving in San Diego and founding Rogov Associates and ROGOV Corp., with Glenda, the team has designed interactive video terminal for Advanced Touch Systems, an autopilot control for Benmar Marine Electronics, packaging and product design for Gen-Probe, a control panel and marine radio for Hull Electronics, a desktop acupuncture device and recharge unit for Intelligent Medical Systems, a portable computer for Kaypro Corp. (that they unwisely never used), a joystick input system for Kraft Systems, a portable toxicity analyzer for Microbics Corp., a control panel study for Monitor Technologies, medical diagnostic packaging and graphics for Nichols Institute Diagnostics, cable TV converter box for Oak Communications, a portable spectrum analyzer for Scientific-Atlanta, and surgical instruments for Vitalmetrics.

Attention To Packaging

The ROGOV team has performed studies and recommendations for American Healthcare Systems, Eastman Kodak,
RTE Deltec and Syva Co.

As in the case of Kaypro, it isn't unusual for ROGOV to design something good-looking that's never used in a final product. On other occasions, a company may have a product that works fine, but looks lousy. That was the case with Oak's Sigma decoder. While technical improvements had been incorporated, "the market feedback we've been getting recently told us it was time to pay some attention to the package," said Tony Wechselberg, an Oak senior vice president.

Benmar Marine's autopilot looked old-fashioned. ROGOV's redesigned Compu-Course 2000 autopilot became sleek, sexy and soft, and was entered into last year's Industrial Designers Society's Industrial Design Excellence Awards, a national competition. So were 370 other products entered. The ROGOV entry came in second place.

"Benmar came to me and said, `We're the oldest company in the business. We've got the state of the art technology, but we're not being perceived that way by the consumer. We have stringent competition from the English, Norwegians and the Japanese, of course.'

Similar Elements

"So I looked at their product. Apart from some of their components, the other elements were what everyone else uses. It's plastic, it's molded, it was not not a bad quality molding. But as a whole, it communicated something that's old and clunky, not something that would hold a finely tuned course. Now compare it to this appearance." And he holds up a picture of his refined design. Ahhhhh.

"I would like to design trains. What people need is to have the things around them brought in line with how they feel about themselves and feel about the world. Style reflects our world in progress. There are things like trains and planes and furniture that are looking very mundane. I'm tired of seeing that same train. I'm tired of seeing that same furniture. There are new materials and better ways of expressing how we feel and what we need. There are more economical ways too.

"The major players utilize a technology shared by all. A car is a package design that utilizes technology shared by all automotive manufacturers. It's the way it is packaged that distinguishes a Ford from Toyota, or even more cunning, an Infinity from a Nissan. The same goes for high-tech electronics. I've seen enough of the ICs and PC boards to see what has meaning. And what has meaning is the interface between the technology and people's needs. Zillions of well and enthusiastic product developers have disappeared because they thought that a box is just a box. Like it or not the box is the ambassador. The design of the product must provide an uninterrupted corridor. The corridor between the technology and the emotional needs of people.

Corridor Investing

"What's so funny about this is that the foreign manufacturers understand that so well. If you look at a Japanese product and their heavy investment in tooling, it's heavily invested in the corridor between the technology and the people: how it's perceived, the color, how it's held in the hand, and what it represents to somebody.

The ROGOV team is working on eight or nine projects now in their new 3,000-square-foot offices on Sorrento Mesa, equipped with Macintosh computers capable of everything from word processing to engineering design.
Co-founder, Glenda Rogov brings a soft analytical touch, trained at McGill University. "She brings her analytical skills to user ergonomics issues."

Imbuing Emotion

Despite the computers and psychological analyses, some of Rogov's techniques are, if not primitive, then certainly emotional and instinctive.

"At Rogov, we design directly in 3-D. I take a piece of foam, get a feel for the size I'm looking for and I start carving. It's back to the whittling. Of course there are product definitions. But we develop the drama as we recite the context, desired experience and philosophy that you want to imbue the product with."

Vladymir Rogov has a vision for San Diego. He wants to help establish a three- dimensional industrial design program at UCSD. "Can San Diego become to industrial design what San Jose is to the chip, or what Greenwich Village is to art?

Why not?" he muses. "We need to include this kind of design in the university system. The nearest design college is Pasadena or Newport Beach.

"My hardest problem is to import hired help. It's hard to find help with any great cultural depth or relevant experience locally, because this kind of work requires tolerance, understanding and empathy for other ways.

"The future of a lot of local electronics companies is going to be in how they utilize their technology into other markets and products, into business products, into consumer products.

"That requires a different kind of designer. It also requires a different kind of engineer. These are whole different challenges."

What is industrial design?
Industrial Design is a cross between mechanical engineering, materials knowledge and art, although it is closer to sculpture.  Industrial Designers study both function and form, and their interests lean towards the payoff, meaning - value-for-effort.  This includes the emotional connections between the product and the user, the experience payoff.
"Industrial Design (ID) as a professional service is uniquely suitable to create and develop concepts and specifications that can add value to both the user and the manufacturer. Be it by optimizing the useability, or the appearance of a product. Another critical difference between engineers and Industrial designers is that Industrial Designers live outside the box versus engineers who most often live inside the box among the cogs and gears.