Last week we wrote that superb product design is normally teamwork. But how is an insanely superb merchandise designed? What are the different steps necessary to come up with an amazing completely new product?
These days we begin the first of a series of 5 articles that show you howto design an incredible merchandise. As so often in life the 1st step involved does not sound quite interesting. In fact, it sounds rather boring.. RESEARCH
Yes, we know, it sounds boring. It can be surprising. After all, most individuals think of designers as innovative geniuses who get up at eleven:00, come up with amazing designs and will go partying at night to get more inspiration for the next day. Yet that is not the way it’s. Outstanding Item Design is hard work. Actually difficult work.
More surprisingly even, it is the result of five formalized stages, which will be applied to every design project, no matter what.
1) Research
two) Concept Design
three) Engineering
four) Prototype Produce
5) Manufacturing Documentation
These days we’ll have a closer look at the research stage.
Say we’re asked to design a protection case for a mobile phone, the kind which is famous for Apple iPhones and other new intelligent phones. Our initial step is for the whole team to sit together to research and discuss the item from a design perspective.
Our team will come up with a set of design criteria which are essential for the item to be successful. This comprises of, but is just not limited to, ergonomics, styling, safety, relative cost, life cycle analysis manufacturability and way more. Typically our clients will let us know before to whom they want to sell their product. Some may target female people , some male customers . Occasionally the target is US customers , from time to time Chinese. The target consumer will affect the products design demands.
Having founded the design criteria we move on to competitor benchmarking. In this stage we take a close look which competitors you’ll face when entering the market using the new item. We’ll investigate competitors design and how they position themselves in the market. The market trend evaluation and target leader research accomplish the analysis and give further details which are required to feed into the concept design stage which will be explained in detail in the next article.
Through the design attitude analysis we investigate how competitors position themselves in the market from a design perception point of view. Are they using a contemporary design or do they adapt conservative styling? Is the design simple and clean or difficult with a number of features? Such are questions that help us to define in which design tangent your item will fit. This and some of our other research activities give attention to rationalising all of these emotive design related factors in a way that customers can contribute to strategic design decision making.
After a comprehensive research product and a thorough discussion with clients it is time to move onto the particular design – the concept design step.
Georgette Adanas has been writing content articles on product design services since 2003.
