The top 5 Learnings From My First Product Design Project
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The first design project in NID came to an end today. These were long days and hard work, followed by fatigue by technology. In the end, the fruits were sweeter than I had expected.
This project taught me quite a lot of things that I’ll carry forward in my journey as a designer ahead in life, but here are five I feel anybody can take away and use them in their own journey.
1) The term ‘product design’ is a very biased term
It implies we design just a product, however, in reality, all we are doing is designing a puzzle piece. This puzzle piece needs to fit in into multiple puzzles at the same time and try to make it more sense out of it than before.
A product is a part of a system, and in most cases, multiple systems. During designing the teabag packaging, not only did the product need to fit into the functionality system that determined the product can be used as it is intended to but also needed to consider semantics, sustainability, material culture and problem-solving.
When mass-produced in the real world, it would also need to fit into the puzzle of supply chain and economic viability. A product is in the end, a piece in the puzzle.
2) Product design is more about the idea and approach than any other factor in its process
Multiple times have I encountered moments where I didn’t know what to do, yet had to push through. I also encountered a moment where the idea I had reached after four weeks of work was already ideated, and hell yeah, had won an If Design award for it (my bad, I should have seen this coming during research).
Obstacles and constraints are present to direct your progress and funnel your ideas. Sticking with the obstacle for a good enough amount of time will make it much easier with finding solutions.
Earlier in the process, I had discarded multiple possibilities which weren’t viable in their original form, instead of thinking about how to solve the problem to make it viable.
Instead, I reached a point where I had come to far to take a U-turn and had no choice but to stick with those problems. Those obstacles turned out to be opportunities in disguise.
3) You know way too much about your idea than anybody else
You know all the nooks and corners of whatever you are doing, which almost everybody else don’t know as much as you do. Representation becomes the make or break factor here.
The clarity of representing your idea becomes a challenge as you are then required to make some choices that you feel are obvious, yet others might not get it. I ran into this while storyboarding the use of the product to show what exactly it was and how it would be used.
I sent it to a communication design student who had no idea about what my project was, and tried to communicate the idea to her just through my storyboard.
The changes were minor, yet improved the clarity of the idea to a very large extent. A clear representation makes an idea more understandable, and more importantly, more believable.
4) Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
I can’t describe in words how true this is. The project was themed ‘Simple Product Design’, yet nothing about it was simple. Ideas overflowed the limits of my brain, and it became a quest to decide what not to do, instead of what to do.
And it is this moment you realise what a blessing constraints are. Instead of giving you tunnel vision, they give you funnel vision. Constraints not only make it easier to make decisions but also reasons those decisions.
5) Designing without a solution in mind is the best method to solve a problem
We stress too much about solutions. We want it to be cool more than wanting it to work. Many a time, we look at a brief or a problem and instantly decode the solution, and tend to pursue that solution only.
I had urges to manipulate my work and research to purposefully deny directions because they were sending me in undiscovered waters.
This was soon beaten out of my system. The first brief I had taken, driven by solution in mind was rejected by my faculty because I did not have the product I had to redesign with me, to conduct observations.
I had to select a new product, and consequently a new brief, and force the discomfort on myself. I had to accept that there were a lot of things I didn’t know, and had to research as much as I could, about things I didn’t even think were relevant at that time, to draw parallels.
Not having the solution in mind beforehand gave me the freedom to explore new branches and take an unbiased fact governed approach over a selfish one. Turns out, I have a much better and innovative result than the one I would have devised on my first brief.
