Grooveking New Product Lookout and Featured Designer Double Feature!!! - Alison Wong and Drybike

As you know, here in the Groovekindom we live in a land of design, inspiration, and some ultra cool people with some amazing ideas. Many of the people who have worked on the Grooveking project have some pretty impressive resumes. Today we want to give a little spotlight to someone who helped greatly with Grooveking's web user interface strategy: Alison Wong.

Alison Wong is a designer-of-all-trades. With a mechanical engineering degree from MIT, she has been involved in just about every industry. She's worked at Ford to develop an aluminum Explorer, at Apple Computer in the iMac division, and at Motorola designing new wi-fi cellular phones now available on the market.

Yeah, that's impressive! Besides her engineering ability, she is a human factors expert with a masters degree from Stanford. She worked at IDEO, a design consulting company, and knows how to work with people. Drybike.com sells her newest innovation.

Selecting San Francisco bicycle messengers as a group to observe, she spent time with with them to develop a product that they needed. Her product, Drybike Weathershields, concentrate on solving the problem of keeping hands warm and dry. Many commuters don't like riding in the rain but often have to. After many trials, she developed a new design that can be applied to all handlebars- they work on scooters, and motorcycles as well. She concentrates on useful, practical design that help people.

Besides making tangible products into reality (as if that wasn't enough), she is also an illustrator and graphic artist and has consulted in industries from toys to universities. Her graphic design can be seen on products sold at such stores at REI. She helps teach design at Stanford University and is trailblazing the realm of educational comics. She is spearheading a movement to make the medium become and effective educational tool. One of her books on teaching design is at: www.ahwong.com/comics/comic.html She uses the comic medium to develop handouts on mechanical engineering to motivate students to learn. All I have to say is I wish I had her around when I took high school physics.

Definitely check out her brand new website Drybike.com to get some awesome weather protection for your hands for all you bikers. We are always excited to showcase up and coming designers. Alison Wong is definitely a designer to watch. We will keep you posted with more developments in her product development pipeline (as well as ours).