What a product should have? How can you explore it? How to get ideations? What are the challenges one face while dealing with a particular material? How can material selection help you to its optimum?
These are some question a product designer faces while designing a product. There are many more challenges but these are some of the basic and foremost questions I faced while working on my first project. We have to design a tea coaster and have to make it using M.D.F board. The size of the coaster has to be 4*4 inch. It’s really challenging when you have restrictions and you have to solve it in the most productive way. We have to make two coasters, so the first step was to design it. The key steps to designing a product are
1) who is the user?
2) purpose to accomplish
3) what will be the environment?
These three things one should think about before designing a product. Then he should get an inspiration from anywhere. As I have designed coasters for the household purpose but one for the modern house and one for the traditional one. I got my inspiration from a duct vent for the modern one and traditional one was inspired by skeleton leaf. Then carrying their sense I explored them because exploring one of the most effective ways to get ideas. So once I explored, I got satisfied with a design. Once you follow the process it’s much easier to find what you want. M.D.F is much easy to work with as compared to other material because neither it’s too fragile nor too hard. You can easily cut it, shape it, and play with it. One of the challenges was as if you don’t know how to use hand tools, you will need machinery to do it but everyone doesn’t have machinery. So one gets dependable on one of the nearby workshops to work or one have to buy the machinery which will cost him high.
virtually true 