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What happened after I quit my job?

I felt that I needed to do something else to develop myself further in a different way for the time being, as I thought that it was not the right timing to find another design job during the recession.

I decided to improve Product Design Forums and Product Design Hub was born out of it to primarily fulfill the need to find the best information from the big amount of discussions, tutorials and advices that have been posted on the forums.

So I spent one month on the web design of Product Design Hub, learning and using the open source Content Management System software Joomla as the backbone. The site was launched in March and the feedback has been good so far. The blogging part of the site is not going as smooth as I wish, but I still see a potential to attract designers and companies to share their design stories and experiences with the industrial design community. If you are interested to know more about contributing articles, please visit this page.

In April I started to work on a freelance project for a Dutch company that is specialized in developing temperature control devices for the greenhouse use. Together with a Dutch friend we are responsible for the complete development from the first sketches to the manufacturing of a family of products.

The tooling started begin this month and the the first test parts came out from the molds. Here is a picture from the mold factory, in which you see a female employee working in front of a plastic injection molding machine:

But then in May I started to feel that I need to go back to work full time in a design environment, as I discovered that I am more interested to work with other designers and people in a design studio where I still can learn a lot of things and also the recession is not making me easy with my online business and freelance work.

So I started to look for job opportunities here in Shanghai, because I still love this city and I still believe that the future in design in China is bright. You can read more about my job hunting experience in a later post.