Highlighting the importance of Cal State Long Beach alumni, a recent collaboration between the university’s industrial design program and Western Digital Technologies has earned five students an opportunity to showcase their artistic talents.
The designs of Josue Gonzalez, Adrian Candela, Scott Truong, Michael Porter and Joshua Portinga were selected to be used on a Western Digital portable hard drive series: My Passport Essential. The hard drives, introduced July 25 at a Long Beach Best Buy, will be sold in the U.S. as well as select retailers in Asia, Europe and Australia.
“[I] thought it would be a nice way to ‘give back’ if we could work it out,” said Mark McCann, CSULB alumnus and product marketing associate at Western Digital, by email. “Western Digital got a lot of hip, fresh new ideas from the demographic being targeted for this product and the students in turn got a chance to see what it’s like to work on a real-world project with a large corporation.”
McCann contacted David Teubner, the industrial design program’s director, regarding the design project. Western Digital hired McCann after an internship. He had suggested a “consulting type project” with his old university to the company.
“I had done a few of those types of projects during my time in the industrial design program,” McCann said.
The project lasted four weeks, the design project utilized 26 students from CSULB’s Design Program. Students had to prepare a total of 10 ideas to present to the company, and students also voted on designs they liked as a class.
Western Digital participated in three separate preliminary consultations or critiques and one final presentation with the 26 students. The company selected 12 out of 78 final designs for market research. $2,400 in scholarships were awarded to the top five students based on “market research, quality of the final designs and their final class presentations,” McCann said.
“[Western Digital employees] had really good input and [they] really wanted us to do well. It never seemed like [they were] just trying to get through it and go home,” said Gonzalez, designer of My Passport Essential’s Boom Box concept. Western Digital later hired Gonzalez for a summer internship.
“It was surprising to find out that my design was well received by Western Digital and their focus groups because it actually did not place in the class competition,” said Truong, designer of My Passport Essential’s Black Hole concept. “It was a pretty special moment in my life. It is the first product that I took part in to be mass-produced.”
According to McCann, both parties benefited from the collaboration.
“It helped us get unique ideas for products targeted at a younger demographic and learn about some new manufacturing processes,” he said.
“It was great to build some bridges between CSULB and Western Digital and fun to work with students because they have passion and they get excited about things. Those five students whose designs went into production also have another ‘feather in their cap’ during job interviews that many other recent graduates won’t have experience working on a real project that made it into retail stores across the globe.”
The hard drives are sold exclusively at Best Buy and will cost potential buyers about $120.