Product Design and Prototyping Basics

Summary: Discusses the issues related to prototyping in product design, including business and production model issues. How can you get your design into the prototype phase and onto production?

Keywords: product design, plastic injection moulding, industrial product design, precision machining services

Body:

Product design is a demanding, often extremely detailed process. At the early prototyping stage, it gets very picky for various reasons including operational and performance issues, and in the later stages production issues need to be addressed. This can be a rather traumatic time for product designers, because the information load often stacks up dramatically, and so does the level of detail.

This workload must be managed systematically. Anyone who’s ever waded through pages of CAD plans knows that even at the most efficient levels of professional performance, time is a major factor from both business and productivity perspectives during the prototyping phase. The core business issue is getting results; the main productivity issue is getting the work done ASAP with appropriate quality.

This situation creates some basic choices for product designers:

1. Try and do all the prototyping yourself:

Some product designers are so talented and so proficient that they can do a lot of the work themselves. Instinctively, they also prefer to be the ones working on “their baby”. Whether or not that’s a good move in business terms, however, is debatable. It’s unlikely in most cases except very basic prototype scenarios that they can do all of it in an economic period of time. The business and design ramifications can be major problems, if they can’t.

The risks here need to be very well understood- Time frames can easily blow out with design modifications, and the economics can get pretty rocky. Budgets can get in trouble with extra time issues, and diverting resources onto one project at the expense of others may also not be a great business move.

2. Best practice- Get professional services to do the prototyping hard labour- This approach costs money, but it also saves a lot of time and effort upfront, and allows the product designer to stand back from the project and focus on quality issues. That’s the situation where the product designer really can home in on design problems and solutions, and it’s likely to be a very productive option, particularly for complex designs.

The alternative here is obviously bottom line based, but with some very productive elements built in:

• Core functions like plastic injection moulding can be implemented- This is basic production, done to specifications which can be translated into future working models.

• Precision machining services can be used to ensure high quality components- This is a critical service, and eliminates the dangerous “ad hoc” approach to these vital parts of the prototype. Some things need to be done in a proper production environment.

• Other designers are good problem solvers- They speak the language of design, understand the issues, and perhaps most importantly of all, commercial services for industrial design have the resources in-house to really get at and solve the issues related to prototyping.

• Efficiency is always valuable- In this case, the efficiency of the product design service ensures time frames are under control, and that systematic management of the prototype build is assured. That eliminates a lot of the risk factors in product design at this very sensitive stage of development.

If you’ve put a lot of work into your product design, do yourself a big favour- When it’s at prototyping stage, get professional support. You’ll never regret it.