We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rina Shin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rina, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

The topic suits my story, but I need to clarify – by “underserved”, I am not just referring to minority. Part of me is speaking about an area of design that is seldom spoken of (CMF Design). The other part of me is referring to “emotional design” that we often lack in design education, and usually, designers who have stronger emotional intelligence are not the same designers who are on the stage and under the spotlight. More details to follow:

1. CMF is what we call in the field within Industrial Design that focuses on Color, Material, and Finish of a product. My professional background comes from the consumer tech industry, but CMF Design can be found in various industries like automotive, home appliances, sneaker design, etc.

Note: I won’t go into too much details about CMF Design here, but if need, I just recently launched an online intro course on “What Is CMF Design?”: https://www.udemy.com/course/what-is-cmf-design/?couponCode=WHATCOLORISFALL (Use coupon code “WHATCOLORISFALL” for free access.)

CMF is beyond the direct verbal interpretation of “color, material, finish”. It is also about understanding what consumers want (the look and feel of a product), durability, and perceived quality of a product.

With the advancement of the AI world or any digital dimension, today’s consumers demand higher expectation for physical things that we can touch and feel. In the other word, we need sensorial qualities that is not available in the virtual world to making meaning of the physical world, and those sensorial experience is what CMF Design can offer.

Especially with companies like SHEIN and Alibaba flooding in the market, many consumers who are tired of these fast-brands, will need companies who pay attention to CMF Design to offer products with longevity and quality.

I believe in the importance of CMF. Despite of it being a niche field and rarely heard of, it’s been my mission to promote CMF Design so more companies and people will start to recognize it. Since 2020, I’ve been teaching, facilitating workshops, and content creating for CMF Design. I will go into more details the next question.

2. Many of us probably already knew that colors carry emotions. Same for material and finish. We feel different emotions from a silky smooth finish to a rough rocky finish. CMF is more than visual, it is also about the touch, tactility, cold or warm, and all of these evoke emotions.

As a CMF Designer, it is our super power to utilize C/M/F as a medium to add emotions to products. I would use certain choice of color and material to make a product to feel “speed and sporty”, or a different choice to make a room feel “cozy and calm”.

That was a quick background of CMF vs. emotions, and here’s my point:

Throughout my career as a designer and as a team manager, I started to realize people carry different levels of emotional sensitivity. I would have designers who are great at sensing how certain colors and materials make users feel. I’ve also come across designers who have trouble even just trying to verbally describe an emotion. For designers who possess higher empathy, they are also better at putting these emotional languages into products that resonate with consumers on a deeper level.

Sadly, these designers are not usually the same designers who are confident in speaking in public or making a presentation on the stage.

At the workplace, we often highlight on designers who are better speakers, and forgot to let the other team members share their voice. We also see better speakers climbing up the career ladder faster than others – not because they are great managers, but often because they are more out spoken than peers.

In design education, we focus a lot on “design-thinking”, and forgot to mention that “design-feeling” is also a skill to master as a designer. And there are two parts to it. First, we need to collectively start to recognize the importance of emotional design in design education and workplaces.

Secondly, once we recognize it as a valuable skill to product design, we will also start appreciate designers with this quality and foster a work environment where their skills are acknowledged and they are rewarded for their emotional intelligence. And for this reason, it is now one of my CMF mission, to storytell the importance of “emotional design” and fostering a workplace that pay respect to designers with this quality.

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I held a speech on this topic at the Women in Design conference earlier this year. Here is more to this topic: https://unwrapcmf.com/?p=2686 (It was my first time speaking to the topic. I didn’t want to make a bold statement in my speech – but women are generally better at emotional intelligence, and unfortunately it hasn’t been widely considered as a skillset as a product designer. Industrial Design is currently dominated by men. Women in Design has some great datapoint if you’d like to reference to it.)

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My academic background is in Industrial Design, and I have been specialized specifically in CMF Design since 2011.

I spent most of my career managing CMF Design teams at corporate companies – started my journey in Seattle, then moved across the globe to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and now in New York.

In 2020, I decided it was time to take a detour in my career track to pursue a MA degree at Columbia. Before moving to New York, since everything was online due to COVID, I was able to spend 10 months in my hometown, Taiwan. That was the moment when I realized there wasn’t much educational resources for CMF Design.

After noticing that scarcity, I started offering workshops and creating educational contents around CMF Design. The journey of “Unwrap CMF” started for the design community in Taiwan (#1 Google search result for “CMF Design in Chinese), and followed my global footprint as I moved to New York in 2021. Now, my readers are spread around the globe from different parts of the world, especially now that CMF Design is gaining more recognition globally.

Unwrap CMF isn’t the only website that has written about CMF, but most of these articles are one-time only. Unwrap CMF is one of the very few that puts continuous efforts in creating educational contents and promoting CMF.

The other differentiation of Unwrap CMF is its digestible contents.

CMF spans across three main stages of product-making: Strategy (trend forecasting, research, portfolio planning, etc.), Concept, and Execution (transforming ideas into manufacturing physical parts). The role and responsibility differ dramatically from one end to the other end of the spectrum. Taking trend forecasting and manufacturing knowledge for example – these are challenging for first timers to learn without a mentor.

The first time when I heard about CMF Design was when I came across a job opportunity. At the time, I have graduated with an Industrial Design degree, but had no knowledge that CMF Design can be a potential path with this degree. This was back in 2011, and there were very few search results I could find online, and most of them were difficult to digest as a beginners whose foot wasn’t even in the door yet.

Having experiencing that myself, I intentionally make my content easy to grasp for anyone at any level. I share bite-size stories about all 3 stages of CMF workflow (Strategy, Concept, Execution), and across multiple social media (Instagram Reels, Threads, LinkedIn, unwrapcmf.com, etc.) and including offline and in-person talks and workshops. Many students have written to me saying the content was very easy to understand and feel relatable.

My audience used to be design students and younger design professionals only. But as these contents are easy to understand for pretty much everyone, I am also getting non-designer audience, which many are people who work in the making of physical products.

Unwrap CMF is a one-person creation. Profitability wasn’t the mission when I started the platform. It was more for the community and to foster the next generation of designers.

As I am transitioning Unwrap CMF into an LLC, my next and ongoing mission is to generate profitability – not from the educational part of it though. Instead, the educational content will double as marketing materials, to attract new clientele and new projects.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

“Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life” by Stuart Diamond

The title suggests negotiation skills, but the contents is really about putting efforts into understand the other person’s perspective and try to find a common ground for a win-win.

I really took the advises through every aspects of my life especially at work. Trying to think like my team member / manager / client helps me to understand their true needs and allow me to be the type of support they would like to have.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

For me, the most effective strategy for growing my clientele is continuing the work that I was already doing for Unwrap CMF, creating educational contents and promoting CMF.

I did not expect Unwrap CMF would turn into a business when I started it in 2020. I got lucky, really. If I hadn’t start teaching/writing in 2020, it would be a lot harder for me to start a business. With Unwrap CMF, I already have some recognition in the field and didn’t have to start from scratch.

I am not a business person or a sales person by nature. I say that in a way of self-realization, and not to look down on myself. I don’t feel comfortable walking into a networking event thinking that I need to make a business happen. After struggling in the beginning, I came to understanding of I should be respecting who I am and what I enjoy doing, so having build on top of existing Unwrap CMF really helps to grow new clientele.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://unwrapcmf.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rinaunwrapscmf/reels/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rinashin/