The weekly podcast Design Mindset, powered by KeyShot, has become a premier platform where designers explore how creative concepts evolve from initial instincts to market-ready products. Episode 13 tackles a challenge every creative professional faces but rarely articulates clearly: trusting that inner voice that draws you toward risky ideas before the data supports them. Host Radhika Singh describes it as the mysterious inner guidance that drives our best work, that feeling when numbers point one direction but something deeper urges you to try a different path entirely.
This week's episode features industrial designer and entrepreneur Ti Chang, Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer at CRAVE, the San Francisco-based company creating design-led vibrators and pleasure jewelry for women. Ti has built her career by trusting her creative compass in one of the most stigmatized consumer categories, consistently making moves that appear commercially risky on paper but quietly establish new product categories. From Duet, an early crowdfunded USB-rechargeable vibrator, to necklaces that function as vibrators, her work demonstrates how to use intuition without abandoning analytical rigor.
Ti doesn't treat intuition as a vague feeling but as the foundation of her design decisions. "Intuition is something that have guided me throughout my process," she explains. Her primary filter is straightforward: if a concept doesn't resonate deeply with her, it's unlikely to connect with others. "If you follow your intuition to create something that resonates with you, there's a much higher chance that you'll resonate with somebody else." Drawing from Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, she applies this philosophy concretely to industrial design through a three-part test: finding something that serves people, interests her personally, and matches her skill set.
For Ti, intuition isn't anti-research but rather the compass that guides which questions to ask, which users to serve, and which ideas deserve the intensive work of engineering and validation. When asked what trusting that compass feels like, she's candid: "It feels scary. It feels scary and it feels isolating because you're the only person who sees it and nobody else quite understands it. And so for a long time, you're going to just be in a scary kind of alone, a lonely spot." This loneliness, she suggests, is inherent to being early to market with innovative ideas.
Designing for intimate wellness requires navigating carefully between overly safe and too provocative approaches. Ti describes her work as "knowing her playground" – avoiding clinical, anonymous forms that reinforce taboos while steering clear of designs so polarizing they alienate her target audience. Her strategy involves living in the middle ground, where aesthetics are aspirational enough to shift culture but accessible enough for actual purchase and use. "You want to be able to nudge people along, bring them along with an aesthetic that they find acceptable and that they can digest, while all the while pushing, you know, aspirational and also creating room for a little more edginess, you know, without completely polarizing them."
The commercial reality shapes her design philosophy as well. "If I created something that was just so polarizing, I'm sorry, like I would probably sell three a year, you know?" This isn't just bad business but misaligned with her mission. "I know my playground. I know what will work for the agenda that I am trying to help people have a more open conversation about pleasure." This agenda influences decisions about materials, silhouettes, and how prominently a product can sit on a bedside table without obviously broadcasting its function.
CRAVE's Duet serves as a compelling case study in blending intuition with rigorous engineering. Long before USB connectivity became standard, Ti and her team questioned why intimate products still relied on disposable batteries and awkward chargers. Their solution was a sleek metal vibrator that plugged directly into USB ports, with separated motor and electronics for enhanced safety and durability. In 2008, before the Kickstarter playbook existed, Ti self-funded prototypes, sourced metalwork in China, and brought early units to adult product trade shows. Rather than over-relying on focus groups, she observed buyer behavior, using immediate purchase orders as market validation that her instinct correctly read cultural trends.
If Duet was bold, pleasure jewelry represented the decision that truly made people question Ti's judgment. In the episode's rapid-fire round, when Radhika asks about decisions made on pure intuition that everyone thought was crazy, Ti responds immediately: "Pleasure jewelry." Converting necklaces and bracelets into fully functional vibrators that could be worn publicly contradicted every industry convention. Investors struggled to understand why anyone would want their vibrator as a necklace. Only after the pieces existed and early adopters responded emotionally did the market begin embracing the concept.
Ti carefully avoids claiming that empowerment resides in objects themselves. She rejects the notion that women must wear pleasure jewelry to feel powerful, instead framing empowerment as internal, with products serving as optional tools that resonate with some people while leaving others unmoved. This nuanced approach reflects her deeper understanding of how design intersects with personal agency and cultural change.
A significant portion of the episode's value lies in how Ti translates private hunches into concepts that investors, engineers, and retailers can work with practically. Stakeholders don't fund feelings – they fund roadmaps and tangible artifacts. Visualization tools, including KeyShot, the episode's sponsor, play crucial roles in this translation process. These tools help her explore materials, textures, and finishes in real-time, with renders serving not just for pitch decks but for testing her own instinctive reactions to an object's presence. In intimate product categories, she often finds these visceral responses more valuable than sanitized focus group feedback.
Simultaneously, Ti respects data enough to let it override her intuition when commercial rather than artistic stakes are involved. She laughs about being wrong on color choices: "I've seen myself thinking like this color is going to be amazing. I've been wrong many times. And when you're wrong with something as, like, in product, when it comes to color, you're stuck with a lot of inventory and you do not want that. That is not good for business." In hypothetical startup scenarios where user testing clearly favors clinical aesthetics over playful designs the designer loves, she's clear about shipping what users are ready for. However, she refuses to let numbers become the only voice. When asked what designers who only trust data are missing, her response is sharp: "Missing their heart and soul."
Later in the conversation, Ti discusses being diagnosed with ADHD and autism as an adult. Her hyperfocus on topics like gender equality, pleasure activism, and emotional design has quietly powered her work, enabling her to persist with difficult ideas long after others would have moved on. The downside is that when she's not deeply interested, progress stalls. Rather than fighting this pattern, she now incorporates it into her compass, choosing projects she knows she can remain obsessed with for years.
Beneath all the specifics of sex tech and crowdfunding, Ti's operating system remains consistent: when you can't see the full path, you prototype. She treats the try-learn-iterate cycle as both a design tactic and a method for navigating an unconventional career. When Radhika asks if she would still design something her intuition loves even knowing it won't sell, Ti says yes, "if I think it's going to be a fun journey." Some ideas exist to move markets; others exist to keep the creative self alive.
Episode 13 of Design Mindset captures this balance effectively, presenting intuition not as research's opposite but as the spark that identifies which risks are worth taking initially. The conversation provides a practical framework for designers seeking to honor their creative instincts while building sustainable businesses. The full episode is available weekly on YouTube, offering deeper insights from one of the industry's most innovative design leaders.
