Experience Design | Research

To varying degrees, all product designs are experience designs. Industrial Design as a discipline proposes to understand the experience that exists between people and products and ultimately the experiences that those products enable. It is in this context that designers encode an understanding of that experience in the product design itself making it more attractive, accessible and even more serviceable and environmentally responsible.

Most projects begin with a research and reference phase to understand the context within which the product will function. It is often during this phase when we discover missed opportunities, and are inspired to create more elegant solutions.

Product Design | Illustration

I don’t illustrate my ideas so I can remember them later… I illustrate them so I can remember them NOW.

Sketch communication is a fundamental skill and a critically important tool for capturing and conveying ideas and solutions. At times, the quality of a sketch can affect the quality of the resulting design solution. Probably one of the more soulful and enjoyable aspects of being a designer is having the opportunity to pull shapes, ideas and experiences from a page of paper.

After design reference and research, this is where much of the work of design begins.

Prototyping | Testing

Somewhere between conceiving of an idea for a product and cutting steel on an injection molding tool there are important validation steps that must be taken. One such validation step is the design, preparation and construction of physical prototypes.

It just so happens that I was one of the first customers for a 3D printer. While working at Orion Research in 1998, I became the second or third customer for the then-new Z-Corp rapid prototyping machine. This machine built parts by printing a water based binder onto fine cellulose powder and repeating this process until the part (printed one layer at a time) was complete.

Things have come a long way. I now have three Rapid Prototyping systems at home including a Markforged Onyx desktop printer illustrated here. The machine is capable of printing fully functional prototypes for small scale devices and parts within hours. This speeds the validation process, improves the part designs and increases the confidence of the design team when we move toward production and ultimately “cutting steel tools”.