Wonderful Merchandise Design – how it all begins
Last week we wrote that wonderful product design is continually teamwork. Yet how is an insanely great item designed? What are the different steps essential to come up with an amazing brand-new product?
Today we start the first of a series of five articles that show you howto design an excellent item. As so often in life the 1st stage involved does not sound very interesting. In fact, it sounds rather boring.. RESEARCH
Yes, we know, it sounds boring. It may be surprising. After all, most individuals think of designers as imaginative geniuses who get up at 11:00, 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 is. Outstanding Item Design is hard work. Actually hard work.
More surprisingly even, it’s the result of 5 formalized stages, which will be applied to every single design project, regardless of what.
one) Research
2) Concept Design
three) Engineering
four) Prototype Manufacture
five) Manufacturing Documentation
Nowadays we’ll have a closer look at the research step.
Say we’re asked to design a protection case for a cellphone , the kind that’s quite popular for Apple iPhones and other brand-new smart phones. Our first stage is for the entire team to sit together to research and discuss the merchandise from a design perspective.
Our team will come up with a set of design criteria which are crucial for the merchandise to be successful. This incorporates, yet isn’t limited to, ergonomics, styling, safety, relative cost, life cycle analysis manufacturability and far more . Typically our customers will let us know before to whom they want to sell their merchandise. Some might target female individuals, some male buyers . From time to time the target is US individuals, from time to time Chinese. The target consumer will affect the goods design requires.
Having founded the design criteria we move on to competitor benchmarking. In this step we take a close look which competitors you’ll face when entering the market with your brand new product. We will investigate competitors design and how they position themselves in the market. The market trend evaluation and target leader research accomplish the analysis and present further details which are necessary to feed into the concept design stage that 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 complicated with a lot of specifications? These are questions that help us to define in which design tangent your item will fit. This and some of our other research activities concentrate on rationalising all these emotive design related factors in a way that clients can contribute to strategic design decision making.
After a comprehensive research merchandise and a thorough discussion with customers it’s time to move onto the true design – the concept design step.
Georgette Adanas has been writing articles on product design service since 2001.
Processing your request, Please wait....
