Product Design

A product is designed once and made thousands of times. That one fact separates product design from everything else in this endorsement. A building is a one-off and a sculpture is a one-off, but a kettle has to be manufacturable, affordable, packable, repairable, safe in the hands of somebody who never reads the instructions, and still worth looking at after five years on a worktop. Every decision is multiplied by the production run.

This note takes you through the working method: a brief with real constraints, user research that produces measurements rather than opinions, ergonomics and anthropometric data, fast sketch models, the manufacturing processes that decide what shapes are even possible, and surface as the last thing you touch and the first thing the user does. The designers here made a vegetable peeler, a wall-mounted music player and a desk lamp, and each one is a lesson in the difference between a form and a product.