Product Design
Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics? Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. [...]
For most companies, manufacturing changes begin when an issue is identified on the manufacturing floor and end when a solution is implemented into a product’s design. But there are a million ways to manage what happens in between—and how you navigate this gray area can either help you or hold you back. To ensure that [...]
We saw the bill of materials (BOM) for the iPad 2 last week and were impressed by the low costs Apple was able to achieve for its newest version of the tablet, which is considerably improved over the original. With iPad 2 sales reaching almost a million units in the product’s debut weekend, Apple has [...]
*Lightbulb* You’ve just conceived a brilliant new invention. Now what? A recent post in the MFG.com Mojo blog offers suggestions to help you navigate the early stages of “bringing your creation to life.” MFG.com’s “4 Rules For Inventors & Entrepreneurs Sourcing Their Products” are: Enlist a designer – You’ll get better manufacturing results if you [...]
For his final project in the University of Montréal’s design department, product designer Christophe Robillard asked, “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself communicate the same message?” The Victor Bike is his answer to his own question. By re-conceiving the shape of the frame, reducing the amount of [...]
The betacup is a recently completed competition to re-imagine a coffee cup with reduced environmental impact. As many as 58 million coffee cups are discarded every year in the United States alone, and along with most of them, a sleeve that protects the holder’s hands from scalding. The proposed solutions offer a range of great [...]
Marc wrote recently about the motorized bicycle that is the latest addition to the Volkswagen product line and a way for the company to extend its brand into an adjacent market. And while innovation is often at the heart of new product development, it is worth pointing out that building a product line can be [...]
If you’re facing a tough design challenge you may want to look to nature to see how millions of years of evolution have addressed a similar problem. Biomimicry (which Marc mentioned in a blog post about tools to help design more environmentally responsible products) is the mimicking of nature to solve engineering or other human [...]
Most umbrellas today are cheap – literally and figuratively. They turn inside out at the slightest of winds. They are given away to advertise everything from tequila to the World Wildlife Fund. The handles are molded plastic, the spokes are pliable pot metal and the mechanisms seem to stick more often than not. They seem [...]
Joe gave some great advice in his series of posts on how to gather and apply useful product feedback. Quirky, a “social product development start-up” that builds and sells consumer products takes it a step further. The company uses crowdsourcing to determine first which products get designed and then which products get manufactured. A recent [...]
