Interview with Emily Tang, Co-founder of Studio Doozy Limited

Featured Alumnus: How's our 2015 BA graduate doing?

Interview with Emily Tang, Co-founder of Studio Doozy Limited

DC: Design Channel
ET: Emily Tang (2015 graduate of BA(Hons) in Design (Industrial & Product))

DC: What have you been doing after graduation?  

ET: After graduation, I had the opportunity to work for a start-up company in Hong Kong, where I got to learn about a mixture of design disciplines. Other than design-related skills, I also experienced the day to day operations, people management, and customer service of a start-up company. This gave me a glimpse and mental preparation (or at least I thought) in what it takes to start a company. That same year after graduation, I, fortunately, won the Hong Kong Young Design Talent Award and had the opportunity to work at Roca's headquarters in Barcelona as their product designer in their Advanced Toilet Technology Department. In stark contrast to my previous working environment, as I was working in a company with a lot more structure, Roca gave me great insight into the pros and cons of a start-up and a well-established cooperate setting. The most valuable knowledge from this working experience was the opportunity to be a part of the design process of their upcoming smart toilets from concept to manufacturing. After coming back to Hong Kong, my partner Joan Calduch Ferran and I co-founded Studio Doozy Limited, where we combined our design and technology skills to create all-inclusive healthcare and lifestyle products to enrich people's lives. 

Emily and her partner Joan Calduch Ferran co-founded Studio Doozy Limited. 

DC: What's the product you have developed recently? Is it related to your final year project, Libue? 

ET: The primary mission of Libue was to provide a higher quality of living for my Grandfather as he had Parkinson's disease and required assistance to use the toilet. On the same token, all the new products we are working on in Studio Doozy is also about enriching human's lives and creating an all-inclusive environment for people with or without mobility limitations. We have been focusing on the bathroom space, as this is one of the areas where many accidents are recorded. We have been further developing "Libue," and after various user engagements, we came up with the second generation design, which is now called "Violet." We also have a few projects with the same mission in the pipeline. 

Libue, the toilet designed for Parkinson's disease patients and their families, 2015

Violet is the second generation of Libue which provides an all-inclusive environment for people with or without mobility limitations. (click here to read how it works)

DC: What are the fundings you have received? To what extent have these fundings helped start your business and maintain its operations? 

ET: We have received two main fundings for Studio Doozy so far - The Hong Kong Design Centre’s Design Incubation Programme (DIP) and the PolyU Micro-Funding. DIP had given us a great head start by providing us with free office space for the first year (second year HKD$4000) in a well-located and new building in Wong Chuk Hang. We also got support for office equipment, promotional and training expenses.

PolyU Micro Fund offered us with a milestone based funding that helped accelerate our prototyping process and provided us with excellent mentors that understood the current start-up space very well and were very willing to guide and give us constructive feedback.

Both funding programmes had given us an excellent opportunity to learn about what it entails to start a company, supported us with resources to reduce our expenses in the first two years, and allowed us to focus on execution. It gave us a great foundation to maintain our operations in the long-term. 

DC: Are there any challenges your company now facing? And what are the opportunities you are anticipating? 

ET: At this moment, the biggest challenge is finding the right manufacturing partner. For us to be able to move onto the next stage of our business - commercialisation, we need a reliable manufacturing partner that can help us realise and bring our prototypes to mass production. We are anticipating one of our product launches by the end of 2020 and cannot wait for our designs to be out in the market to provide more opportunities for people of all ages to age and live better and safer at home. 

DC:  Is there anything special you learned from the work placement at Roca and still benefiting your work these days? 

ET: Everything I learned during my work placement at Roca had and is still benefitting my work and company development these days. As Roca didn't have an in-house designer when I started working there, it was an excellent opportunity for me to explore the role and also to see what I could bring onto the table. I also learned what it takes to communicate and work together in a big team that comprised of the project leader, electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, and even a law consultant. To be able to witness and be part of their upcoming smart toilets' development allowed me to understand the design ideation and realization stage better and to find the right manufacturing partner. 

DC: Why did you choose PolyU Design and Product Design for your undergraduate studies? Did the programme fulfill what you had expected? 

ET: I grew up with my grandparents, and I have always found that the inevitable mobility limitations of aging can always affect one's quality of living. For this reason, I have had a lot of ideas but never had the skills to realize them. I had this thought that if I could practise product design, then I could get the best of both worlds - realising my ideas into functional and aesthetically pleasing solutions. When I was applying for university, PolyU was known for its design school, and so I applied and fortunately was accepted. When I came in, I had classmates that had already studied product design for three years prior, and with my close-to-zero knowledge, my classmate's competence motivated me to work harder to catch up. For this reason, the first year was a lot of independent practical learning. From PolyU, I was able to learn the basics for practical knowledge to know what I had to study at home but also the theoretical side of design thinking and applying that thinking into an executable manner. 

The first prototype of Libue was being made for showing at the Annual Show where Emily was selected as one of the Best of Show exhibitors.

DC: What is your advice for young design graduates/design students?   

ET: Our elder generation and societal beliefs have always been telling us that design is not a real profession, and it is easy to be discouraged unless you are a "star" designer. However, something I found after graduation is that practising design, in general, allows us to not only have problem-solving skills but on top of that observation and empathy that many professions do not utilise as frequently. I believe that empathy is a skill that requires a lot of practice and with it, you can achieve a lot more when solving problems. Product design is a process of constant iterations based on our target end-users' feedback. It is an art that requires us to understand our target end-users' daily routines fully on a physical and emotional level. Then another layer is to try to integrate our solutions seamlessly into their daily lives. Although I am still learning to be better at these skills every day, I have realised they come useful in many other aspects in life - whenever problem-solving is required. So my only advice is don't let tradition and culture discourage or hold you back. If this is your passion, and you always remind yourself to stay curious and empathetic, there will always be a lot of opportunities out there. And if this might be a passing phase of your life, at least you have learned and practised some valuable skills that will always come in useful in other aspects of life.  

Awards: 

SCMP The 5th Spirit Of Hong Kong Awards
Innovating For Good Award
September 2017

CreateSmart Young Design Talent Special Award 2015
October 2015

James Dyson Award
National Winner, Hong Kong
July 2015

Read more:

Meet The 23-Year-Old Hong Kong Entrepreneur Redesigning Toilets For Parkinson's Patients (Forbes, 26 Dec 2017)

Innovative Hongkonger designs a new toilet for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease (South China Morning Post, 23 May 2017)

智能坐廁惠及長者 (Studio Doozy鄧曉瑩)  (StartupBeat, 7 Feb 2020)

騎馬式座廁 讓柏金遜症患者更有尊嚴地獨自上洗手間 (夠POP/#496 metropop)