Jinsop Lee
Most products and brand experiences are designed for the eye alone. Buyers see them, ignore them, and forget them within a day. The commercial cost is not aesthetic, it is attention, recall, and willingness to pay a premium for what otherwise becomes a commodity.
Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer and TED speaker who helps organisations build products and experiences that engage all five senses, not just the visual.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jinsop Lee
- He gives commercial teams a usable grading method for sensory experience, the Five Senses framework, that translates design theory into something a marketer, product manager or operator can apply without a design background.
- His TED Talk on multisensory design has been viewed over 1.6 million times, which means audiences arrive primed for the argument and leave able to recall and reuse it.
- He has shipped work for LG and Jaguar Land Rover and exhibited at CES, 100% Design London and Light + Building Frankfurt, giving him operating credibility with product and brand functions, not just lecture-circuit credibility.
- Recognition from Red Dot and Good Design anchors the talk in professional design judgement, not opinion.
- He pairs serious craft with a comic, story-led delivery, which lands the substance with audiences who would tune out a more academic treatment.
Biography highlights
- TED Global Talent Search winner, TED Long Beach 2013; “Design for All 5 Senses” has over 1.6 million views.
- Founder of design firm Uncle Oswald Is My Hero.
- Former Associate Professor of Industrial Design, Kyung-Il University, Korea.
- Red Dot Design Award and Good Design Award recipient.
- Work exhibited at CES Las Vegas, 100% Design London, Good Design Tokyo, and Light + Building Frankfurt.
- BA Industrial Design, Syracuse University; MBA, Yonsei University.
Biography
Most product categories now look the same across the price ladder. Visual design is solved, and customers have learned to scroll past it. What still separates one product from the next is the texture of the experience itself: the sound a car door makes when it closes, the resistance of a button, the smell of a packaged good when it is opened for the first time.
This is the territory Jinsop Lee works in. His Five Senses framework, presented at TED Long Beach in 2013 and viewed more than 1.6 million times since, gives a usable way to grade any product or experience across sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. It is not a designer’s tool. It is a grading sheet that a brand or product team can run through in a meeting.
The underlying craft is serious. Lee studied industrial design at Syracuse University, took an MBA at Yonsei, and served as Associate Professor of Industrial Design at Kyung-Il University. His commercial work has shipped through Uncle Oswald Is My Hero, his own design firm, and through engagements with LG and Jaguar Land Rover. His pieces have been shown at CES, 100% Design London, Good Design Tokyo, and Light + Building Frankfurt, and have collected Red Dot and Good Design awards.
For commercial audiences, the value is that he can take a senior team through the same grading exercise they will see online from him, then turn it on their own products. Most buyers leave with two or three specific experiences they can no longer evaluate the old way.
Key speaking topics
- Multisensory design
- Customer experience design
- Design thinking
- Creativity and innovation method
- Product development craft
- Brand and experience differentiation
Ideal for
- CMOs and brand directors rebuilding around experience rather than awareness
- Heads of product and product design in consumer goods, automotive, hospitality and retail
- Innovation and R&D leaders running new product development programmes
- Customer experience leads in service-led businesses
Audience outcomes
- A working knowledge of the Five Senses framework, applied to a product or experience the audience already owns.
- Specific examples of multisensory design done well and badly, drawn from familiar consumer categories.
- A sharper instinct for where current products under-deliver against customer expectation.
- A shared vocabulary that commercial, design and operations functions can use in the same meeting.
Talks
Lee walks audiences through his Five Senses grading method and applies it live to familiar products and experiences.
Key takeaways:
- A grading method for sensory experience that non-designers can use.
- Worked examples across consumer categories, including products in the room.
- A clear test for where investment in experience pays back commercially.
A practitioner’s account of design thinking as a problem-solving discipline outside the design studio.
Key takeaways:
- Where design thinking adds genuine value, and where it has been oversold.
- How to run the method in a non-design function.
- Common failure modes and how to avoid them.
A case for analog tools and rituals as part of serious creative work inside digital-first organisations.
Key takeaways:
- Why digital tools narrow creative range.
- Specific analog practices that improve product and idea quality.
- How to build them into existing team rhythms.
Design literacy for executives whose decisions shape products without their being designers.
Key takeaways:
- The handful of cues that separate good design from decoration.
- How to brief and judge design work as a non-designer.
- How to spot when a product is being sold on visuals alone.