Background photo by Alice Donovan Rouse

Listen: craft and quality in design — featuring Jean-Paul Haire from Paris

Skipper Chong Warson
1 min readDec 15, 2017

The Fjord group design director from la Ville Lumière talks about feng shui, how “being done is better than being perfect,” and navigating a multitude of languages in the studio and listening to your design teams

This is the third edition of our discussion around craft and quality, this time with Jean-Paul Haire of Fjord Paris. Like our other conversations, this episode covers much ground. We begin by talking about design as a way to find problems (but Jean-Paul cautions against finding solutions too quickly); discomfort being an agent of change; as well as the importance of empathy.

Here are some of the highlights from today’s conversation:

  • Growing the Paris studio from 14 to 54
  • Feng shui and why order matters
  • We must take the risks, must go further, and if failure occurs, it must be something that we can learn from
  • How athletes train, musicians practice, and designers work
  • The contrasting notions of needing to start somewhere and the danger of solving problems too early
  • “Do You Matter” by Robert Brunner (link)
  • 2010 film “The Book of Eli” with Denzel Washington

As always, thanks for listening.

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Skipper Chong Warson

Leadership coach, design director at SoftServe, and host of How This Works. Formerly at thoughtbot SF, Fjord NYC, and Shep (acquired) among others.