Henry Huang
Henry is from Toronto and graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 with honors and awards. After completing his internship at Umbra, he was immediately hired as a full-time designer in their head office in Toronto. In 1999, he relocated to Hong Kong to assist in setting up Umbra's first Asia branch office. Henry currently manages a very talented team of Industrial designers and Graphics designers in Umbra's China office.
1. What are some of the Umbra products you designed? What is your specialty/expertise? What are you currently working on? In the past I've designed numerous products in almost all categories in the Umbra line. Some of the more notable products are the CASCADE lamp, SCOPE table, SLIP shoehorn, SPOUT bottle opener, TEARDROP drapery rod. Having being in the product design industry for over 13 years now, my expertise is now on product development engineering and manufacturing for Umbra's creative product concepts. It's hard to predict which projects I work on each day. New product concepts and challenges appear every day, requiring new and innovative approaches in resolving them. Each day is very different from the day before and different to tomorrow.
2. What are some of the blogs/books/magazines that you read for inspiration?
3. Out of all Umbra designs, what are some of your favourite products? What do you like about the product?
Additional stuff you'd like to include:
WOBBLE chess set inspiration: The design was rather a simple mergence of 2 toys; chess and weebles. I was always inspired by the weebles simplistic functions which brought so much enjoyment. The time just seemed right for the child's toy to finally grow up. While developing the WOBBLE Chess set, what surprised me as I searched "wobble" on the web was the comments left by chess manufactures. Their proud note of "absolutely NO wobble" ?this made all the difference for me to design. |
