Missed the webinar? No worries! Here’s the recording:
Come one, come all! We’re hosting the second webinar in our inaugural series at lunchtime in three weeks – Wednesday, June 26th, 12-1pm EDT.
Whether you’re asking the question, “what’s the value of an independent industrial design studio anyway?”, or you’re all about getting in on the benefits of these human-centric “SWAT teams”, this webinar is for you!
Jump in on the design dialogue with us, and learn the why and how behind independent industrial design firms, and how they add meaningful value to a product’s market success. Bring your questions, curiosity and get your thinking cap ready. It’s gonna be lit.
We’ll see you there.
You the Farm, We the Garden: Benefits of an Independent ID Studio
Yes, you eventually make profit by selling an idea/object/service tuned for economies of scale: mass production, mass distribution, and mass adoption. That’s where you will have more price elasticity. This “business thinking mindset” is a proven, solid, financial approach, and much needed to keep that huge corporate operations machine in a constant state of a flow. This approach is the “Wall-Street Way”; the reactionary way; keep making money quarter-to-quarter; “cash flow is king”… It’s all a great approach for that specific end result.
But can you use this same mindset to imagine and create products completely new to the world? Products that are useful, usable, ergonomic, clever and beautiful. Products that are truly are out of the ordinary, unique, compelling and different.
If you think yes, we beg to differ.
To reach this goal, you have to change gears and adopt a 180-degree shift in mindset. This other mindset, the “Industrial Design Thinking” (IDT) mindset, which makes you to step back a little to immerse in, absorb, and feel popular culture, new behavior patterns of new generations, the latest swings in adoption propensities, the changes in mature consumer expectations in their existing and emerging lifestyles, and more – this mindset is also needed to tackle the genesis stages of new product development.
This IDT approach is the more human centric way that responds to the fundamental needs, desires and aspirations of the end user (along with all the multi users and stake holders in the creative supply chain). The team that stewards IDT can be an internal one – if your company has the vision, budget and rigor to maintain it – or an external one. But it has to be intentionally kept separate from the immediate demands of the “big machine” that only thinks to add another me-too variant of the same object to the sea of sameness in the market. This team’s goal is to seek a strategic and statistically significant way to plan for the next product portfolio in the mid-term and long-term product development plan.
This human-centric swat team, the advanced design studio, works better if is maintained as a skunk-works within the enterprise. Or it can be an independent design studio, like ours, trained and always on standby to tackle this very unique task in the world: To be able to oscillate between the grandiose vision of a radical innovation and, at the same time, the granular details of squeezing intuitiveness and elegance into a physical end product. This team especially has the overarching ability to cross reference and cross pollinate end user behaviors from diverse product categories, and not just be myopic to a particular industry category. That compare-and-contrast between multiple, relevant ecosystems makes the inherent attributes of the product more robust, and it gives you a better chance of making the product successful in the market. Why? Because we realize that apart from the category-specific problems to solve, it’s imperative to identify the major sets of pain points that lie at the intersection of categories; always clashing with each other. We have to reduce the friction here too if we are to produce a successful product.
As an independent design studio, we are not necessarily held down by the constraints of the category product legacy – good or bad – or how you evolved to the point you are. We seek out multiple pathways of innovation to get to the desired the end result. When market disruptions happen – and they WILL happen – it’s unpredictable. With the IDT mindset, we never have to get back to the proverbial drawing board when these disruptions come. We are always at the drawing board! We are always triangulating between the design trends, material innovations, latest technology, the IOT, and the mighty changes in the societal and cultural domain.
In this webinar let’s better understand why and how an independent design firm can add meaningful value to the product’s market success.