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Industrial design | Product development | 416-651-3539 |
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Industrial Design in a Phase Review Product Development Process |
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Industrial design activities should start before the concept phase in a phase gate product development process. The industrial design concept should be one of the deliverables at the stage gate review going into the concept phase. The product development team, management, investors, users, research and other partners should have a mental image of what is being developed to bring early buy-in, an excitement, a common understanding of the end deliverable of their disparate activities: to achieve a coherent unity. This early buy-in and excitement is a product development intangible: no accurate performance or impact metrics exist to objectively quantify intangible value. Recent presentations, however, on such intangibles, their benefits and methods to leverage them, have been made at management roundtable product development conferences. A major challenge in cross discipline product development is ensuring communication occurs across organizational boundaries. When all product development contributors share a mental image of the final embodiment of their work, the intangible of improved communication occurs. As example, consider the ever present technology trade-off discussions that occur between electrical, firmware and software. If all parties are aware of the embodiment of the design concept, someone is more likely to raise the question to involve others on the cross discipline team on how to best incorporate the technology trade-off, and any further implications. If the parties lack the design concept then there is no impact to their decision, and any problems are inherited and dealt with later. When all parties in a cross discipline product development team inherently know to get together to address an issue before it becomes a single discipline problem, this is improved communication in action. Currently we lack performance metrics to measure it, but there is one guarantee: the above or similar scenario will not increase product development timeline, it may have no effect, most likely it will shorten the timeline and deliver a more coherent design, which itself will decrease downstream timeline. With time to market the most important element in product development, improved communication is one of the most effective ways to meet the challenge. A concept design phase that starts with a reasonable physical embodiment of the device will help the product development team’s communication. The industrial design concept should be included at the start of the concept phase. © Pier Design, 2004 |
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