bc: How did you meet?

MU: We met about seven years ago. We lived in the same neighborhood.

SM: Yes, we lived in the same neighborhood in San Francisco, and we had some common friends in the design community. Then I actually left for New York, to go back to graduate school.

UM: Yes and after some years, I took the job to be a one-man office in New York (for the design agency IDEO). I started out in my apartment in New York as my office. After about a year with IDEO in New York, I decided to quit and start an office with Sigi.

bc: What brings you together as professional designers?

UM: It has less to do with cultural background and more to do with our training. Sigi went to NYU to extend her industrial design training into the area of software and interaction design.

I am basically more of a mainstream industrial designer. Even though I’ve started working on some of the software side as well. So when we work on a project, we first work on the concept together. Then when it comes to execution, Sigi usually focuses on the software and I focus on the hardware.

bc: Antenna Design has been around now for 4 years. What have you learned about running your own design shop (versus working for a company or within an agency)?

SM: One thing is that we have to do everything ourselves – from maintaining computers to doing design and billing and client relations. We never had to do that when we worked for a company. Usually as a designer in a firm you don’t have to deal with these things.

I found that interesting in the beginning but nowadays I don’t care so much for being involved in everything.

UM: Administration is a necessary evil. But for me, being on our own, pretty much comes down to our fate. If we make it or we don’t make it, it’s all up to us.

SM: Yes, it is a really big incentive to know that if you do something successfully, it is because of your own time, effort and conviction. When you work for someone else you often do not get the credit you deserve, the company or boss often takes all the credit.

UM: Of course they should be credited for creating and running and organization. That can be seen as an extension of their body.

SM: It is also very satisfying to know that if we get recognition it is not because of someone else’s reputation or history. But because of something that we have established ourselves.

bc: What sort of work makes you most excited?

UM: I like public projects. Public exposure is the key whether it’s a public project or designing commodities. Getting people’s opinions - hopefully good opinions – that’s the ultimate reward for me. And working on stuff that has a major impact – that’s very satisfying.

SM: I like public projects too. But they usually entail a lot of pragmatic constraints, which can get a bit tiresome.

I like semi-public things like our exhibition work. We had an installation at the beginning of the year at the Artist’s Space in SoHo and then we did the Firefly exhibition in the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage in the summer. It’s open to anyone but it doesn’t have to fulfill the same requirements as a public work.

However, I think what’s ultimately important on a project is the client or whom you work with. Because that can very much determine the atmosphere of the project. The subject might be very interesting but if it’s a difficult client, it can make it less interesting. And then the opposite can be true also. If you have a project that seems really dry, it can still be interesting if you have a client who is enthusiastic or understanding and is not throwing barriers at us all the time.

bc: What sort of projects have you been working on?

Lately, we’ve been working for quite a few hi-tech companies like Palm, Fujitsu or IBM. We do future forecasting for them. We set up a scene and write scenarios and do storyboards of what products people will be using and how they will be using them.

bc: You designed the new subway cars in New York City?

UM: Yes, so far the Number 6 and Number 2 are running, and the L is coming soon.

We started working for the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) first with the MetroCard vending machine. I initially got that project with IDEO and when I stopped working with IDEO, the MTA said: “Well you are our designer.” So I kept the job.

We continued working on the vending machines as Antenna and things went very well. In the meantime another agency worked on some train project. Then one day, after I made a presentation about the vending machine to a group of executives, one of them said, “Why don’t you design a train.”

SM: And I asked Masamichi: “Do they know that we are only two people? And, if so, is that a problem?” It wasn’t a problem; that was really surprising.

UM: We worked really hard on this. We looked at what the other agency did, and what didn’t work. In a sense we were lucky that we didn’t need to make the same mistakes as the other firm. We just needed to focus on what the MTA really wanted. We spent quite a bit of time talking to different kinds of people, the riders, the New York police department, the maintenance crews, etc.

SM: Also we did go to different cities looking at subways there. Obviously we went to Austria and Tokyo, and any time we went on a trip somewhere, we’d go and inspect the subways.

Now it’s really exciting to be on the new subway cars. People talk a lot about them. We listen to what they say and smile when they say something nice. What’s funny, is that a lot of people are really proud to be sort of an expert about the subway, and they talk about what they know about the new car. It’s really funny.

bc: Do you have an unlimited ride card? Your own car?

UM: No, no free rides.