When Duck Hsieh, design director of Taiwan's Duck Image design house, attended the 2007 Young Designers Exhibition (YODEX) at the Taipei World Trade Center in late May, he carried with him the graduation project of five students from Dayeh University's Department of Industrial Design. The work, a three-meter-tall, 3.5-meter-wide "virtual perception sphere" called To2uch, stopped visitors to the exhibition area in their tracks.

To2uch builds on the IMAX theater concept, applying 360o projection technology to films, games, and karaoke media to immerse viewers in a realistic, 3D setting. A model of modular design, it can be assembled by just two or three people without any tools. Its size can also be adjusted to fit the space available by adding or removing modules, allowing the rapid creation of large exhibits.

To2uch's modular design recalls that of Hsieh's "green" construction-site fence. Hsieh says that the fence project had left him with a niggling sense of unfinished business: it was not itself a complete, freestanding piece of architecture, but functioned rather as one part of a construction site. Hsieh wanted to extend the concept of modularity to a complete architectural work. In his view, this no-tools-required sphere does just that, breaking new ground and blurring the line between architecture and industrial design.

Hsieh's "green" fence, which won a 2006 IDEA award, has been the source of much of his recent acclaim.

The typhoons that batter Taiwan every year wreak havoc on the steel fences around construction sites, knocking them down and sending pieces flying dangerously about. These fences must be replaced an average of three times over the course of a typical two-year-long construction project. Moreover, they obstruct sightlines into construction sites, making already perilous jobsites still more dangerous.

When Taichung's Productivity Architect Company set to work on its Crystal House building in the city's seventh development district, it surrounded the site with Hsieh's modular "green" fence, assembled from square blocks of ABS plastic 60 centimeters on a side. These durable, translucent modules are both easy to work with and reusable. Assembled into a fence, they can withstand winds up to 200 kilometers per hour (Force 16 on the extended Beaufort scale). They can also be lit with colored lights, transforming them into a kind of street art. All in all, the blocks provide an attractive, environmentally friendly, and economical solution to construction site fencing.

The wind-powered bike light (left, center) and removable LED bike light (right) designed for Changhua's Chance Good Enterprises.

Duck Image also earned an iF Product Design Gold Selection in 2006 for its LUXO bicycle headlight. In so doing, it helped its client--Changhua's Chance Good Enterprises--increase the value of its brand and rake in more than NT$100 million in sales.

Formed in 1983, Chance Good was originally a manufacturer of timers for home appliances. But general manager Lin Ching-yi dramatically revamped the company's product line when he sensed a downturn looming in the home appliance industry. Lin wanted to take the company into bicycle accessories, but faced a problem: Taiwan was already a leading manufacturer of bicycles, and he knew that he'd have to come up with something new if his company was to turn a profit. He settled on battery-powered bike lights, which no one else in Taiwan was then producing. He also chose to keep his manufacturing in Taiwan rather than outsourcing it to China. Sales have been booming ever since.

The 71-year-old Lin says that his company did its product development in-house for decades using its own R&D team. But this in-house team often found itself in a creative rut. Looking for something new, Lin decided to hire Hsieh's Duck Image. Chance Good's team sketched out the basic design for a bike light, then turned the project over to Hsieh for polishing. The resulting product was everything Lin had hoped for: European clients with an eye for quality were soon banging on the company's doors.

Because it can be removed from its bracket without any tools, Hsieh's headlight can also function as a flashlight. But his biggest innovation involved the bracket itself. The challenge was finding just the right material. Duck Image ultimately tested 15 materials before settling on a soft plastic resin that makes the bracket easy to attach and remove.

Duck Image also came up with a wind-powered bike light for Chance Good. Wind drives a turbine on the light, which powers its LED. It also charges the light's onboard Li-ion battery, storing power from the turbine whenever the bike is in motion, thus eliminating worries about dead batteries.

This electromagnetically charged green laser pointer can be used for mountain search missions and for signalling.

"Dad," said Hsieh's child one day, "you're awesome. How come the things I draw everyday don't become real, but the ones you draw do? It's like magic." Where does Hsieh's design magic come from?

"The magic's in your own hands," argues Hsieh. "In Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki's film Kiki's Delivery Service, the young witch loses the ability to fly when she loses her faith in humanity. She only regains it when she has to fly to someone's rescue." He explains that you don't create for yourself and you don't just sit and wait for inspiration to come. Instead, he believes that being a designer requires a great deal of life experience and a kind of "I'll die if I don't do it" passion for design. If you don't have those things, you shouldn't "defile" what is in his view a sanctified field.

The lean 39-year-old Hsieh has always loved to draw, and developed an interest in design early on. When Yulon Motors introduced Taiwan's first domestically designed automobile, the Feeling 101, in 1986, it hired Huang Po-pu (then a design engineer with Acer, now head of Wistron's mobile products division) to act as spokesperson for its TV ad campaign. Hsieh, then in middle school, was completely enamored of the ads and decided he wanted to be a designer. But he was destined to study information processing at Chiayi Senior Commercial Vocational School and work for several years before finally graduating from the Graduate Institute of Design at Dayeh University in 1996.

While attending junior college, Hsieh worked for the student association as its art director, doing campus design work and contracting out projects. By the time he graduated, he'd put together a substantial portfolio.

After finishing his military service, Hsieh wrote up his resume on cardstock with a calligraphy brush. He then spent another month designing and meticulously assembling a portfolio before mailing it to Acer. His impressive application package helped him stand out from the thousands of others who apply to Acer every year. In spite of his lack of a university degree and formal design training, the company decided to bring him in for an interview.

His interviewer turned out to be none other than Huang Po-pu. The two hit it off immediately and Hsieh thought he would soon be working for Acer. Unfortunately, the company was then undergoing restructuring and had put a hiring freeze in place. Forced to look elsewhere, Hsieh took a position doing design work at Mysheros Fashion. A year later, he heard from Acer again: Huang told him the hiring freeze had been lifted and offered him a job.

Hsieh's "green" construction site fence, which won a 2006 IDEA award.

In 1993, Hsieh left Acer's offices in bustling Taipei and headed for Taichung, a city which was then hemorrhaging industries.

A typically fickle Gemini, Hsieh is always looking for new challenges. After three years at Acer, nearly all of it working on notebook computers, he was hungry to design new knapsacks, leather goods, stationery, and other products. With that in mind, he decided to go south to sunny Taichung and there founded Duck Image.

Getting a business up and running was no easy task. Desperately seeking clients, Hsieh went through the phone book, cold calling one company after another in an effort to set up a meeting. But with no contacts in Taichung, he had a hard time getting design work. For a time, he even subcontracted work from other designers just to get by.

His first direct client was Cheerful Fashion Goods, a manufacturer of gifts and stationery, which was then trying to produce an oval briefcase. The company had hired an Italian designer who had previously worked for Louis Vitton to design it, but ran into an unexpected problem. Stuck with a zipper that wouldn't open, they couldn't put the new briefcase into production. With shipping deadlines fast approaching, the company was in a bind. Having been referred to Hsieh through a connection, they hired him onto the project. Within a week, he had worked out a solution.

The hours Hsieh had spent on the phone were also beginning to produce results. Chiang Hsi-wu, CEO of leather goods and wheeled-bag manufacturer Crown Luggage, agreed to a meeting, and, when the two men hit it off, brought Hsieh in on a project. In those days, Hsieh used to make his client calls on his motorcycle carrying his designs in a protective tube. Seeing that Hsieh was having a hard time, Chiang soon signed him to a contract worth several hundred thousand NT dollars a year. With that, Duck Image was on its way. Hsieh and Chiang have now been working together for seven years, during which time Hsieh has also added substantially to his client base.

Though a very busy man, Hsieh still finds time to pass on his knowledge to young designers. The photo shows Hsieh teaching a class to students in Tunghai University's Department of Industrial Design.

Hsieh won his first iF design award in 2003 for a baby scale with a white, non-slip, cambered surface that cradles infants in a warm, safe embrace like that of their mother's arms. The scale, which he designed for Charder Electronics, also features a removable handle for easy carrying and storage.

Duck Image has won awards in every year since, accumulating a total of 39 to date, more than any other independent Taiwanese design house and on a par with the number earned by the huge design departments of Asus and BenQ.

Duck Image has now been operating in Taichung for 14 years. In keeping with the character of local industry, 90% of its clients are traditional small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Not surprisingly, Hsieh's design career has tracked the growth trajectory of these companies.

"Most of Taiwan's SMEs do contract manufacturing," explains Hsieh, "so ten years ago the designer's role was to produce drawings. The company's foreign clients would review these and choose the form factor they wanted. But with China's rise, Taiwanese SMEs have had to develop their own brands to survive, creating a much stronger need for design services."

Central Taiwan is home to any number of machinery, tool, hardware, leather goods, zipper, fabric, and carbon fiber manufacturers. As a result, Hsieh's work has included designs for everything from leather luggage and hand tools to medical devices.

Believing that materials are the key to breakthrough ideas, Hsieh established the Duck Image materials laboratory in 2003. The lab draws on the area's spinning, plastic injection and carbon-fiber resources, enabling the studio to play with a broader array of design possibilities and giving it a solid foundation in materials R&D.

With more than 500 products under its belt to date, Duck Image's fine work can be seen nearly everywhere. Among its products is a life-saving green laser intended to help rescuers spot people lost in the mountains or at sea. The laser is water resistant and its light beam can penetrate seawater to a depth of five meters. When hung from a backpack it charges itself electromagnetically from the motion of walking.

Then there's the titanium fabric that won him a 2005 iF materials award. The concept grew out of a month of research and an excess of playfulness, but it may someday find use in serious applications such as adhesive plasters to increase blood flow or relieve neck and shoulder pain.

A sleek scale for weighing infants.

Over the years, Duck Image has grown from a one-man studio into a 34-person design house built on a foundation of firm commitment to design and a unique business model--its contracts run for a year, rather than for the duration of a project.

"To ensure my designs are on target," says Hsieh, "I need to see my clients' production facilities, understand their finances and trade secrets, and even delve into their internal problems. Only then can I offer design concepts appropriate to their corporate culture."

Producing sketches takes hardly any of his time--he can crank out a pastel drawing in five minutes. Instead, he spends the bulk of his time meeting with clients to discuss design concepts.

Hsieh feels that the case-by-case basis on which most of Taiwan's design houses work encourages designers to focus on simply wrapping up the project so they can get paid. Typically, once a design is deemed safe and goes into production, the designer is done. Design houses therefore focus on creating an array of pretty form factors for the client to choose from. They're rarely interested in whether those form factors suit the company's image.

"The annual contract approach effectively gives a company its own exclusive designer," argues Hsieh. "The relationship between the two is different. When it comes time to extend the contract, the company wants to see actual sales or see people mobbing their pavilions at shows. You really have to push your creativity to the limit to come up with unique ways to employ materials, visuals, colors, or surface treatments to create a distinctive brand, to differentiate the company from its competitors."

He adds that whether or not a client allows a designer to get involved in the production of a prototype depends on how well the designer understands materials, prototype development and costs.

Most clients include a non-compete clause in their contract with Duck Image to protect themselves should the partnership come to an end. These typically state that Duck Image will not do design work for a competitor within two years of the termination of their contract.

Hsieh estimates that Duck Image's fees are about five times those of a typical design house. "Taiwanese companies are trying to build brands. Design is an important part of that effort. Even if their design costs are high, they're not nearly as high as the cost of everything else," he says. "Suppose it costs NT$500,000 to design a new product," he continues. "You're going to spend NT$5 million developing the prototype, NT$50 million marketing the product, and NT$500 million on materials. Suppose you save some money on the design and the design turns out to be inappropriate or doesn't work, you've wasted all that post-design money."

This airtight violin case is equipped with a hand-operated vacuum pump, to provide a protective, low-humidity storage environment for a valued instrument.

Hsieh admits to being shy and unsociable: he's no good at networking and prefers to spend his leisure time holed up somewhere drawing.

But should the conversation happen to turn to design, his eyes light up and his voice waxes enthusiastic. Yet all the awards he's won have brought him no joy. His company may be growing and transforming, but Hsieh worries that its many awards encourage clients to misunderstand the purpose of design.

Prior to last year, Duck Image's limited human resources--it then had a staff of only 12--compelled it to turn away many potential clients. Generally speaking, it maintained working relationships with about 15 clients at any given time. Last year the company expanded its staff to 34, allowing it to grow its client base, but also greatly increasing Hsieh's management responsibilities. He had to spend hours upon hours bringing the newly hired senior designers, many of whose design philosophies were very much at odds with his own, into the fold.

Offering an example of those differences, he explains that when a client responds to a pitch by asking about changing the color to red or making the product a little more rectangular, he wants his designers to start again from scratch, rather than simply accepting the client's suggestions. "That wouldn't be a Duck Image design," he says, "and the more units such a product sells, the more embarrassing to us." But his new designers were inclined to make the changes because they felt that keeping the client happy was paramount.

"How are you going to win international awards if your approach to design is to be content with what's already out there?" asks Hsieh. "If I had been content just to satisfy the client, my business and theirs would have long since gone under." Hsieh says that most clients' demands are only so high, pointing at his head. But his demands of himself are much higher and he can't slack off. "Duck Image intends its designs to spark a reaction from the international market, to solidify a brand image, not to make a client happy."

Hsieh, who revels in the creative side of his work, says that whereas it takes him only ten minutes to design something himself, "Giving it to someone else involves three hours of talking just to get the ball rolling. Then I have to tell them it isn't what I want and spend another hour consoling them: 'I don't have anything against you personally....' It's exhausting," he says.

Fortunately, last year a client introduced him to Su Ming-hsun, then CFO of Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC), the company responsible for developing Taiwan's Indigenous Defense Fighter. When Su retired from AIDC, Hsieh brought him onboard as Duck Image's vice president and turned many of his management responsibilities over to him.

Su was in charge of more than 1,000 employees and NT$10 billion at AIDC and freely admits to being a bean counter. Now he spends his days trying to ensure that every one of Duck Image's projects generates revenue. "A top-flight idea," he says, "like the paperclip or the pencil, can feed you for a lifetime. If you don't come up with one, you'll never escape the grind. Undirected creativity is somebody else's stepping stone."

Duck Image's revenues were NT$20 million last year. Now that the company is fully armed with a larger design staff, Su hopes this year's revenues will surge to NT$60 million.

The wind-powered bike light (left, center) and removable LED bike light (right) designed for Changhua's Chance Good Enterprises.

"Taiwanese businesses must not draw the conclusion that design awards mean that design is a panacea," argues Hsieh. "They can't harbor misguided fantasies." Rather than relying exclusively on design, he says they must make use of their marketing, distribution, branding and strategic resources. Asked about his own company's future, Hsieh says that Duck Image will be working with the Industrial Technology Research Institute, the Plastics Industry Development Center, the Metal Industries Research and Development Center to create new materials and a platform to share information.

"Why can I produce a drawing in just five minutes?" asks Hsieh. "People think that it must be innate, but these lines actually represent a tremendous amount of accumulated knowledge. I know a lot about production processes, the arts, and possible market reactions, and can make good guesses about future lifestyles." Hsieh says it's like the ability authors have to write articles off the cuff: they have something in their heads that allows them to rapidly sift through the 50 classic lines that flash before them the moment they sit down to write.

"A good designer doesn't have miscommunications," says Hsieh, "because design is simply the transmission of symbols." According to Hsieh, there are four keys to keeping the new ideas flowing--symbols (using things such as leaves or whales as models for your designs), functionality (transferring the Lego building block concept to a fence gives you a modular fence), materials, and patent searches.

Hsieh has been praised as one of the forces driving the transformation of Taiwan's SMEs, but sometimes doesn't appreciate being referred to as a "designer." He prefers instead to be called an "artisan." In his view, design is simply a method, a matter of choices. The ultimate achievement is a product that needs no design, which keeps you from manufacturing massive amounts of garbage. He offers an example, explaining that if you have enough windows and plants in a room, you don't need an air conditioner. Hsieh believes that designers have to get away from "material" concepts and get back to nature and to fundamental human needs.

Hsieh comes from a Christian background--his father is a minister--and sincerely believes that God created the origins of life in six days. He also believes that the talent to create is a divine gift. "Designing is likewise a kind of creation, sacred and idealistic," he says, testifying to his faith.

This light, strong titanium fabric may be put to use in pain-relieving plasters.

Using fiberglass to make this wrench cuts its weight by 20%.

The wind-powered bike light (left, center) and removable LED bike light (right) designed for Changhua's Chance Good Enterprises.

The To2uch "virtual perception sphere" that Hsieh developed with students from Dayeh University's design program can be turned into a huge, soundproof IMAX-style theater.