WORD
ON THE STREET
by Holiday Dmitri
The Booster - Wicker Park
August 7, 2002
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WORD
ON THE STREET |
Bart Brejcha is a man ahead of modern times. As a kid, he often found ways to live in his head, entertaining himself with questions of a methodical nature. At the age of six, young Bart sketched out an elaborate system detailing how a rail system with enough electric currents could keep a train afloat on a bed of magnets. "When I was young, I always played with magnets," Brejcha remembers. "I was fascinated on how magnets would repel themselves." More than a decade later, the Japanese developed a prototype of that same rail system. "If you see a cross section of how their system works, you'll see it's just like my drawings as a kid," Brejcha says. Then a six-year-old dreamer, Brejcha is now a 37-year-old "idea engineer." Today, as the principal of the Chicago-based design consultants Design Engine Inc., Brejcha takes from the cosmos of concepts in his mind and puts them into play in the real world. His sense of childhood wonder remains, as does a question that has occupied his mind for a long time: Why isn't the future already here? He's not talking about sci-fi, but rather, problem solving using existing technology. Brejcha stresses that Deep Productions the name his company is commonly known as is "all about design and problem solving," driven on developing hybrid-products that combine the study of culture with technology. "Hybrid-products aren't being made," he laments. "While most designers are talking about making keyboards smaller or screens that roll out, we at Deep are talking about projecting the screen of a laptop and digitizing the keypad onto any table. This technology exists. We simply need to re-appropriate what exists into products that work for our modern culture." "Manufactures and their marketing teams are told what to do by buyers of Target and Home Depot," explains Brejcha. "Those buyers don't think people will buy those hybrid products, but we plan to change that." Brejcha is an idea man, a behind-the-scene problem solver. He is magnetic, a visionary, and a mechanical engineer with a deep love of wireless electronic gadgetry. Brejcha bears a madman's fearless fervor that, coupled with genius, has made him a successful businessman. He arrived during the onslaught of digital-age entrepreneurs, and was there at one of the most pivotal business phenomena in the last half-century -- the Internet gold rush. Straight out of Atlanta's Southern Tech with a degree in engineering, Brejcha moved to Chicago to work for Motorola, but then started his own company in 1993. Centered on utilitarian organization, Brejcha's company specializes in product engineering and training, Internet and web training, and web design. Brejcha also publishes an online design magazine, design-engine.com, for an international audience of product designers. "We were really ahead of our time," Brejcha says. "I was personally using the Internet in 1989, working with such UNIX utilities as FTP (file transfer protocol) and IRC (Internet relay chat) at a time when no one was calling it the Internet." "We didn't boom with the boom because we didn't have that shrewd salesman in there selling ridiculous huge projects. We had no investors. We have no debt. We were not a dot-com company, but supplied the technologies to the other dot-commers. They hired us to do their work as extreme freelancers." Deep has created more than 100 household products selling at outlet chains like Target, CVS stores and Walgreen's. But their focus as of lates is on electronic gadgetry and includes recently completing a hybrid product that combines a PDA with a GPS handheld tracking device -- 5,000 units of which were recently sold to a Brazilian police force. A colleague once told Brejcha, "Your ideas are so far out of the box, you don' t even see the box." A quote Brejcha very much exemplifies. "We have rules in the office," he tells me. " No one is allowed to say 'no'. If a person feels compelled to say no, they must sleep on it. That idea must spawn another idea that may be the solution to a problem. We are problem solvers. Mankind would have never gone to the moon if people said and believed in 'no.'" Side
Note: Calling all industrial designers, product designers, engineers,
3D illustrators, inventors, CAD Jocks and all other technophiles: Design-engine.com
is soliciting applications for their original photoreal electronic product
competition. Prizes include cold, hard American currency, cool products
from sponsors and some recognition from your peers. For more information,
call Bart at (312) 226-8339 or e-mail competition@design-engine.com. |
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