Real Fake Exercise Equipment

This was a brief project in which a Lab 318 client asked to have an OEM product re-designed so that they could compete with branded products they were already manufacturing for the Spanish and American markets. After completing some research we found that we were unable to make the supposed changes without breaching international and US-PTO patents. For this reason the project came to an early halt.

My role was as Project Leader so I had responsibility over the entire project. I was also involved as a research person so I worked with the rest of the group on patent searches and elemental design research in looking for solutions.

This was an interesting project because it asked me to do what western companies fear China is all about, copy. At first I had some concerns about its legality and so on but I soon realised that it was common practice and just part of the world so I made the most of the project.

It was also an interesting project because I was given quite a lot of responsibility and I was not managed at all during its course. In relation to this project I answered only to the Lab Manager. I was given a secretary to help manage information transfer because it was a research intensive project and I had 2 fellow researchers helping me read up on all the patents.

Patent searching is something that the workers in the Lab were quite used to as they would regularly have to approach projects similar to this one. I was amazed by how well they could understand the convoluted and impenetrable english of a patent while their spoken and written english was relatively incomplete.

When I reported to the Lab Manager that the project should be discarded because it was inefficient to submit to the clients needs given the circumstances of the protection in place by the USPTO, I was surprised that she was not affected and said, "OK, I will call the client tomorrow," and that was the end of that. I am not sure why it was so easy but for whatever reason we never really talked about the project again.

Upon reflection, I think nobody in the lab wanted projects like this though more than a few of them are likely to work again in such a context in the future. It seems to me that designers in China are not as they had been described to me and it was only market demand that made copying and so forth common place. The jobs available to designers in China almost all require such things, even in relatively high priced organisations such as Lab 318.