Industrial Designer – How to Start a Project from 0

The best way to start any project is to do your research. You need to know where to invest time and money, what tools to use, and how to execute your plan. So, if you are a business owner who wants to start a project from scratch, you need to know how to get started. 

From our experience, we can say, If you are a designer who is just starting out, you will have to do a lot of things to kickstart your career. You will have to build your portfolio, get your skills in order, and get acquainted with the industry. 

Let’s dig deeper into the topic. 

Steps to Design your Project from Scratch 

Crafting a Fresh Concept

Brainstorming is a technique used to generate many ideas quickly. It can be done by yourself or with others. It involves writing down all the things you know about the topic at hand. Then you sort through those ideas and select the most promising ones.

List your Idea to Create the Basic Formation

To get things started, you may have a short session of brainstorming. After settling in, the team tasked with coming up with innovation would let their imaginations run wild. They might scribble something or sketch anything. Alternatively, they might employ computer tools to experiment with preliminary concepts for designs. These should tell the product’s primary function, purpose, working process, and targeted customers. 

An Industrial designer doing the primary drawing

Customer Requirements and Running Trends

  • Product design is a combination of science and arts. Designers MUST keep that in mind. 
  • Designers must know who their customers are and how they behave.
  • Consumers want different things depending on their age group.
  • Designers should always keep an eye on trends to ensure that their designs remain relevant.
  • A designer’s job is never done—it just keeps evolving.
  • Designers must consider many factors when creating a new product.
  • Varied consumers have different priorities based on their age, gender, and other demographic characteristics.

Studying the Rival Companies

Plagiarism is copying someone else’s work without giving credit. It is sometimes good because businesses copy other companies’ products to learn how well they sell. Industrial designers also copy other designers’ designs to make better ones.

Putting together Fundamental Specs, Parameters, and Shapes

A product design service would never start designing a new product without first understanding the final product. This is because it is impossible to know how the finished item will look until you see it.

Analysis of Product Viability

Industrial designers will have to test the variability of the product following the below steps: 

Demand & Supply

  • Assess the demand and supply of your ideas, and don’t let them go until you find something people actually want.
  • When designing a new product, you must know what people want before you design the product.
  • There is a huge difference between knowing what people want and actually meeting those wants. 
  • There is a demand for furniture generally, however, there is no demand for three-legged chairs made from coarse metals. So, bear in mind what material you are using. 
  • There should always be a balance between demand and supply.
  • When assessing demand, ask yourself “What does my audience want?”

Approximate costing and Target price

These will depend on the following factors: 

  • Raw materials cost and availability; 
  • Realistic selling price; 
  • Distribution costs; 
  • Potential production costs;

To find out how much money your company is making from each product, multiply the quantity produced by the average cost per unit of production. Then divide the result by the total amount of products made. This gives you the average cost per item. Use this figure to set a reasonable selling price.

Functionality

The first step in designing any product is to define its function, purpose, and audience. Then you must know your users’ environments and the context of their tasks. You also need to think about the physical characteristics of the device, such as shape, weight, size, and material.

  • Is it safe?
  • Is it user-friendly?
  • Does it work?
  • Looks good?
  • Is it comfortable?
  • How much time does it take to learn it? The more complex, the lesser sales. 

Prototype Development and Fixing Issues. 

Prototypes are early product versions. Paper mockups, cardboard models, or tangible objects are often used. Prototypes test concepts, collect feedback and confirm product assumptions. At this stage, you can build your prototypes by prototype 3d printing or other prototype manufacturing process.

Industrial Design and Prototype Teams will build a product concept. CAD or CAM are examples. CAD applications like Solid works or CATIA are used to create prototypes. This step involves assembling a team to promote your idea. You must decide what to make and how to make it. You could outsource some project elements.

There is a high chance that your prototype will not be the same as the design. The designer will run practical tests, evaluate them and fix the issues, 

.Live Market Test

Doesn’t matter how accurate the prototype is, still you can get complaints from the market. Therefore live market demonstration is crucial. 

  Market a demo batch. 

  Sell them in a no-vulnerable environment. 

  The primary test MUST have a specific time. 

  Check the results and make the required changes. 

Release Large Quantity Products 

Once the product engineering service is satisfied with the current progress of your project, it will be put into full-scale production. Hopefully, manufacturing will go well. If you did your part right, the item should sell like wildfire.

After all the planning and preparation, the actual launch of your product is when you need to pay attention to detail. You may not realize it at first, but every aspect of the launch needs to be planned out carefully. From the website to the packaging, everything needs to be perfect. If something goes wrong during the launch, it can cause a lot of damage and even lead to a loss of customers.

Conclusion 

We sincerely hope that you have gained anything from it. Businesses must be aware of the product development cycle. A lack of a thorough product development process can put your company at risk.

It is still important to be aware of the process even if you outsource your product development to a third-party industrial design firm. You’ll know what to expect and how to prepare yourself if you understand the procedure. It’s also important that you know exactly what the design business should be doing at each step of the process. Also, as an industrial designer, you are not just simply designing a thing, you need to understand how it is created. It is obvious that you’ll work with different companies in your career, like on-demand manufacturing companies who help you to get your design to be made, which also means you need to have a strong coordinated ability to speed up the whole product development process.