Industrial Design | Industrial Designers

Industrial design is the process of imagining, creating, and iterating the design of a new product or redesign of an existing product that will be manufactured using mass production techniques.

Here are the four important steps you must follow to turn your ideas into a successful new product:

1. Define – Talk to customers, do market research and competitive analysis.

2. Explore – Measure the opportunity, build your business case, and develop the idea.

3. Build – Know your target, use experienced industrial designers, and be flexible.

4. Learn – Use focus groups, listen to your team, and take advantage of social media.

To learn more, read 4 Important Steps To Turn Your Idea Into a Successful New Product.

It seems obvious, but whatever it is you’re designing should solve actual every day problems. Without this, business success will be impossible.

Importantly, these should be real problems that many people face, particularly if you’re creating consumer products. If you solve a problem only you have, you’re unlikely to find a market for your product even if your industrial design is high-quality. If you solve a problem that you think people have, but one that isn’t a real problem, you won’t find a receptive audience for your solution. It’s hard to create new value with industrial design that people simply don’t need.

Figuring out problems can be challenging, even for design firms. Often people don’t know what they need; they just know they have a pain point. Observation and research should be an integral part of your discovery process to determine where your customer’s challenges are and how manufactured products can solve those challenges.

Focus and clarity of purpose are critical elements that can define the success (or failure) of industrial design of a product.

We’ve all seen the jack-of-all-trades manufactured products that seemingly do everything, and while they may seem like great ideas on paper, execution often proves more challenging.

There’s nothing wrong with aiming for the stars, but make sure you have a solid plan for how you’re going to get there. If you have to, work towards that goal in stages. Advise your industrial designer to start with a simple design process, and build from there. This is one reason why industrial designers like Charles Eames and Egmont Arens are so highly respected in the United States and around the world.

Successful industrial design is built upon a solid foundation of business plan, market research, domain expertise, problem-solving, and common sense, coupled with a creative innovation process.

And, importantly, you should consider applying one of the better-known processes for creating successful products known as user-centered design. This design process puts the needs of users and customers first by employing an effective product design cycle: research, design, test, and iterate.

It’s important to make sure that the solution being created by your industrial designer matches the needs of end-users who run into such problems every day. Doing this will improve the overall user experience. With products that require manufacturing or other third-party involvement, building the right thing the first time is crucial, especially with mass production.

A challenge that has plagued many new products is how to manage the manufacturing process, including how to understand production costs for product design.

It’s vital to integrate DFM, or 'design for manufacturability' as early in the industrial design process as possible. DFM is the process of creating manufactured products that are easy to manufacture, with two goals: making things less expensive to build, and making it easier to build a lot, and quickly.

Many founders lack skills and experience in this area, so plan ahead and make sure you have an experienced industrial designer in place. When your product moves from the design concepts to the prototype phase and into manufacturing, integrating DFM means you can be more confident you can build products systems inexpensively and quickly. This is where your business interests and the design process create strong synergies that can help you long term.

Today, consumers globally are more concerned about the environment than ever before. People want environmentally friendly industrial design.

Recent research shows that 48% of U.S. consumers say they would definitely or probably change their consumption habits to reduce their impact on the environment. This data is well represented in the $128.5 billion sustainable fast-moving consumer goods purchased in 2018.

Designing for the environmentally-conscious consumer must include environmentally safe components without disrupting the quality of life they are used to. Make sure your industrial designer undrstands the importance of green design and incorporates it into the design process in order to create a better user experience.

We know you have many choices when you look to hire industrial designers. The most common method is to hire a design firm with a staff of industrial designers, but most companies don’t have a budget of several hundred thousand dollars for industrial design. Another common method is to hire freelance industrial designers, and you can work 1-to-1 with an expert industrial designer on crowdspring.

There are other ways to get your industrial design. For example, you can create high-quality industrial design by < a href='/start-a-project/product-packaging/product-design/details/package/?origin=industrialdesign' target='_blank'>starting a product design contest on crowdspring.

When you post your custom industrial design project on crowdspring, you’ll get custom industrial designs submitted by product designers from all over the world. You won’t have to waste your valuable time digging through bids and proposals. You’ll pick your favorite from actual designs. In fact, clients have told us that choosing their favorite is the hardest part of the whole process!

When using crowdspring for industrial design services, you can focus on getting the best result possible. We take care of everything else. With our award-winning customer service, hassle-free guarantee, customized legal agreements, strict intellectual property standards and fantastic project management tools, we know you’ll be happy. And if you’re happy, we’re happy.

And if you prefer to work with a single designer for industrial design, we’ve got you covered. Just like a traditional crowdspring project, in 1-to-1 projects, you decide how much your project will cost. The minimum price for a 1-to-1 project starts at $200 (which includes crowdspring’s fee) and you can always increase the award.

Designers receive 100% of your award. Our fees cover the cost to host the project, our award-winning tools, escrow and payment, and custom contracts and non-disclosure agreements.

Although the vast majority of the businesses we work with are smaller, we regularly work with the world’s best Brands, including Amazon, LG, Random House, Starbucks, Barilla, Phillips and many more. We also regularly work with many of the world’s best agencies - and tens thousands of entrepreneurs and startups from over 100 different countries.