Industrial
Design
Industrial Design is the process of designing a product or system with a key market or user in mind. We will work with you to understand your stakeholders and develop a marketable and usable product to suit.
Bring Your
Idea to Life
As we do for our own products, we offer our knowledge to our clients who need to design a new idea or concept, we have the skills to bring that idea to life up to the prototype phase, ready for production.
Understand Your Market, Your Users, and You
A strong understanding of the market and users you are designing for is crucial to creating a successful and captivating product or service.
At the start of a project we will ensure that we understand who, what, and where we are designing for, understanding the user, the environment, and the system your product will interact with.
Understanding your brand will help us strengthen its visual identity in design, along with tailoring an experience to match a tone that resonates with your users. Remember, a great product markets itself.
Conceptualise
Whilst the market and users are an important aspect of product development, so is actually having a product. As part of the development process we will brainstorm, concept, and style a product to suit the user needs, market drivers, and your personal branding and philosophies.
Product development affects multiple stakeholders, we want to ensure everyone’s needs are met.
Prototype and Test
A product can never be considered ‘ready for market’ unless it has been tested. The concept phase allows us to pose questions and theories regarding how a product may function or fail.
Prototyping allows us to test those theories through trial and error until we are confident with the product we are delivering. Can you truly be confident in an untested product?
Interact With Your Users
Understanding your user is important, but preliminary research only solves so much. Interacting with your user throughout the development phase of a project ensures they have a say in the product they are using.
Running workshops where we test prototypes, casually converse, and observe your consumers and how they interact with your product allows us to understand their drivers (wants, needs, motivations), and how best to tailor a product to them. If the design isn’t for you, it’s for them.
Discovery & Workshops
Understanding the product, the brand, the customer base, product users, and the market is crucial to delivering a product that meets stakeholder needs.
Running workshops plays a large role in this understanding, so we like to run a few over the course of the product for both the user and the seller. This process aims to uncover and discover.
Concept Sketching
Hand drawn sketches are a staple of any design toolbox. It allows designers to experiment and brainstorm ideas rapidly. In this step we will spend some time brainstorming ideas for how the product will look, beginning with defining the form, and branching out into finer details, colours, textures and materials, and graphics.
A part of the ideation phase will include pin-ups and concept scoring, grouping and voting on different design elements for further exploration. These may be presented as pen and paper sketches or high quality digital renders
CAD & 3D Modelling
3D Modelling is the next step in understanding a product. Any ideas of interest from the Concept Phase generally get moved to the 3D Modelling phase to explore them further in a three-dimensional landscape. 3D Modelling allows us to further refine the shape of a product and define any limitations to constrain the project or overcome.
The outcome for this stage could either be an appearance 3D Model (something that looks like the finished product, but not detailed enough to manufacture, something you would use in presentations or marketing), or something more detailed that would be suitable for prototyping and testing.
Prototyping
Whilst sketching and 3D modelling are a staple design tool, nothing is more effective at understanding a design than physical prototyping. In the same way that CAD allows us to understand a product three-dimensionally, where sketching doesn’t, physical prototyping allows us to perceive a product’s scale, something not entirely achievable in CAD.
It also allows us to interact with the product, test out ergonomics, see how different elements interact, and see how our design translates into ‘real life’. The level of prototyping is up to your discretion, from low-fidelity hand-made models and 3D prints, to CNC.
