The process of product design is still physical

Industrial designers have an increasing array of digital tools at our disposal—CAD, Keyshot, Procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator, and, now, Vizcom—which allow us to visualize our ideas with incredible realism and detail. These go a long way to help us imagine how a product will look and feel, but they aren’t enough to make it real; you can’t hold a rendering in your hands. Problem solving happens beyond the screen, and design for the physical world demands a physical kind of thinking.

In our tech-driven age, this may sound like luddite idealism or a kind of “skill nostalgia”. The reality is that modern industrial designers still need to wield hot glue guns, x-acto knives, and mini files, no matter what our computers can do. At Smart Design, this means spending time in the shop.

For anyone who visits our Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, the shop is the tour highlight—and for the designers and engineers who work here, it’s heaven. It’s important not just because we love to make things, but because it gives us a place to do the scrappy, dynamic, collaborative work that is core to making good products. Our founder, Davin Stowell, built the practice of prototyping into our studio’s DNA, offering high-fidelity models to clients in the 1980s instead of drawings because he believed they held more value. Design is a practical art, and “we believe in bringing things to reality…that’s a part of our history.”

So whether we’re designing something as small as a pair of tweezers or as big as an MRI machine, we’re making prototypes. They might be 3D prints with moving parts, a few pieces of foam core quickly glued together, or sanded and painted to look like the real thing. We’re never making prototypes just for a quick pre-launch validation or to say that we did it. Building and holding things with our hands is an invaluable way to work through problems, and integral to being Smart.

Active brainstorming

When you think of “brainstorming,” you might picture a bunch of designers and engineers in a room surrounded by sticky notes, sharpies, and quick sketches pinned to the wall. That is, indeed, a part of the picture. To really think through how something looks, works, and feels all at once, we have to think in three dimensions.

This is especially true when designing something that is meant to be held in the hand, like much of our work for OXO. An understanding of how the body might interact with an object is essential to making something feel natural and easy to use. This is where scrappy prototypes really shine; you can spend a few days sketching and modeling a fancy handle or you can turn a toilet paper tube into one and actually act it out.

Davin relates this process to traditional sculpting for Industrial Design: “With carving in foam…you would just know whether it was right or not. It’s just intuitive as you’re doing it…you’re actually making changes live.” This fast, no-frills approach is a powerful tool for figuring out what a product really wants to be, so the core functionality and user experience become embedded in the final design.

Reality check

Once we have an idea for what we want to make, CAD is the next step towards making it real. It helps us dial in the details with precision and get a more realistic picture of what the final product could look like. Despite the added realism, the experience with a design in CAD remains two-dimensional, causing small details to become big and the big picture to become unclear. 3D printed prototypes help us take our simulated designs off the screen so that we can evaluate the right details.

Thanks to ever-evolving 3D printing technology, today we have the freedom to print early and often. This means that every design decision can be an informed one, and we can test things out before going down any one path. Instead of looking at three small variations side-by-side on the screen, we can adjust the CAD, print them, and try them all in the same day.

This is especially helpful for products that are very small and detailed, like the tweezers or finger nail cutters we designed for EDJY. We constantly printed dozens of concept variations to ensure that what we envisioned would make sense in the real, three-dimensional world. Once things came off the printer, we took them to the shop for sanding, assembling, and even adding weight to create the right balance in-hand.

Making more prototypes can lead to better products, faster—but it can also lead to more waste. In an effort to limit this waste and support a circular material economy, we started a 3D print recycling program through TerraCycle. We’re excited to see the impacts already: we’ve diverted 46lbs of PLA from the landfill in just 5 months.

Understanding and innovating how it’s made

As we think through the user’s experience with a product, we have to keep in mind how it’s going to get made. We must balance business needs and technical constraints with our vision for the final design. For especially complex, innovation-forward projects, this layer of design for manufacturing (DFM) can be the toughest problem to solve. On paper, it’s hard to tell if an idea is really feasible and sometimes the only way to find out is to build a prototype.

One way we work through these challenges is by talking to Ronald Ondrey and Terumasa Fujita, Smart’s long-standing Design Prototypers, shop masters, and resident experts in how things are (and could be) made. We never have to ask them if something is possible, only how. Working on the Gatorade Crossover Tumbler, we leveraged their expertise to help us prototype an innovative lid and handle design, so we could validate functionality and test out different DFM approaches before our client invested in tools for mass-production.

Building these kinds of prototypes isn’t just about proof of concept. The process forces us to work through the logical steps of construction, so we have an opportunity to build in efficiencies before the final hand-off. This up-front work makes for better and more reliable products in the long-run.

Keeping collaboration at the core of design

Ultimately, the shop is a space for collaboration. It’s where we build things, break things, and turn out-there ideas into great products.

Not only does prototyping help designers and engineers solve problems together, but it also allows clients and real users to participate in the design process alongside us. When we make a concept physical, we translate technical and aesthetic ideas into a language that everyone can speak. And the more voices there are to shape the final product, the better it will be.