kitchen design ideas software
>> product tank: hey product tank here. inthis series, i'm going to take you through the product design process, sharing with yousome of the things i've learnt over the last 15 years to help you become a better designerand improve your projects. in this episode, i'm looking at innovation. innovation in product design could come froma revolutionary idea, but revolution is almost as rare as rocking horse poop. what's this,maybe, oh, oh, no, false alarm. i would say 99.9% of innovation in product design is evolutionary,incrementally improving on what has gone before. now this is a beautiful chair, it's perfectlyfunctional, you could argue it can't be improved, but everything can be improved, dependingon who's using it. there you go. but adding
a cushion to a chair isn't innovation. innovationis defined as a new method or idea. you can innovate every area of a productslife through manufacture, storage, shipping, use, repair and part replacement to its endof life and recycling. i once spent a long time helping to reducethe part count in spray caps and pump actuators, because innovation is often about making thingssimpler by reducing parts. saving just a tenth of a pence on one item won't mean much, buton an item that sells in its billions its significant and saving a few ounces on oneitem won't mean much either, but has a big impact on fuel costs when shipping thousandsand not just economically, but also environmentally. so there are two sides to innovation, theinnovation that the customer sees, that improves
their experience and the innovation that theydon't see, that improves the product behind the scenes. i think the greatest innovative advances inthe future are going to be in materials and manufacturing, because many of the thingswe require and use in our daily lives are already so well established that their functionalitycan't be noticeably improved any further just by changing the form. as an example, lookat tennis rackets. the form of the racket has hardly changed, but the materials havereally advanced to make rackets stronger and lighter. so innovation can always be drivenby advances in materials and manufacturing. to me, innovation is like running the 100meters. there are a lot of teenagers who can
run 100 meters between 12 to 15 seconds withno training. it takes quite a bit of training to be able to run sub 12 seconds and lotsof dedication, effort and natural ability to run under 11 seconds. the amount of extratraining you have to put in to run a fraction of a second faster is disproportionate tothe amount of time you gain so you have to really want to do it and innovation is exactlythe same, it does take a lot more hard work and time and often the improvement is fractional,so some people view innovation as risk. now, there can be a strong argument for if it ain'tbroke don't try to fix it. but these days, most markets are so competitive that to notinnovate and improve, especially in areas like consumer electronics, to keep doing thesame thing over and over is far riskier. there's
a brilliant line by james bryant conant, beholdthe turtle he makes progress only when he sticks his neck out. with all innovation, you have to be wary ofintroducing gimmicks. the best unique selling point is one that provides a clear improvement,ideally for the same or definitely a cheaper price and that makes your design more appealingaesthetically or otherwise to your target audience. so if we park improving a product by lookingat areas of its life cycle, how else can we innovate? innovation can come simply through your designphilosophy, why do you design? a long time
ago i was introduced to the principles ofinclusive design. if i design an object for the person who would find the task the hardest,i improve the design for everyone. a simple example is the redesign of a clothes peg idid for a neighbour who suffers from arthritis. using standard pegs put pressure on her fingersso redesigning the peg made it easier for her to use so hopefully better for everyoneelse as well. the materials that i used are exactly thesame, but my design philosophy and carefully listening to my target market was what helpedme innovate on that occasion. another method is to observe products fromdifferent areas and combine their functionality to lead to a new product breakthrough. i useplasters, correction rollers and sellotape
and my designers intuition tells me that somewherein the combination of these products from different areas, could be an innovative woundcare product. but with this method, you are waiting to happen upon these things, it isnot problem led and so it is rarer to get success. so what i wanted to show you, because thisisn't one of those series that just talks about stuff and especially as this is thefirst episode in my series on product design, is how to innovate through getting the rightbrief. the brief is the start of every successful project and i cannot stress enough how importantit is for you to answer the brief properly and for companies employing designers to givethem the right brief, so it's important that
where possible designers work with the clientto create the brief together based on discussion about the desired result. there are lots ofexamples and advice on how to construct a brief on the internet. but i wanted to showyou how framing the brief directly affects the outcome. so to demonstrate, i'm goingto follow two briefs to design a vegetable peeler. i've chose a vegetable peeler, becauseit's a simple two piece design, but with innovation it's worth considering that the less complexthe product, the less opportunities there will be to come up with something new, sotoday because i've only got two parts, my task is going to be harder. the first brief is to design a home cooksvegetable peeler using a standard blade. i've
looked at the hard points, the things i haveto use and design around and in this case that's the peeler blade and possibly the handledimensions. i've also researched other competitors peelers and looked at people's behavioursto try and find improvements. as soon as i'm given a brief, my head fillswith a myriad of ideas and i find the first thing to do is get all these preconceivedideas out of my head onto paper, so my mind can be open to let new ideas in. i spend alot of time working ideas up in plan, because i find its the fastest way to work up conceptsthat i can then make quick models from to develop form. using the existing peeler blade i generatedlots of forms and whilst i looked at areas
with different grips and de-eyeing ideas,the only vaguely innovative element i have been able to incorporate is a scraping device.so here is a rough model of my final design that i have made in wood. i've extended thede-eyeing area across the top of the blade holder to create scraping elements for cleaningvegetables and i've removed material from the handle, without sacrificing comfort orgrip to make the product lighter and more economical and environmental. but as you cansee, it's not very innovative at all. now let's look at framing the brief anotherway - what if the brief is to design a method for home cooks to remove the skin from vegetables,it's a subtle change to the brief from designing an object to tackling a problem, but instantlythis opens up such a huge range of possibilities.
now my investigation can be really broad,i can look at all sorts of areas, ploughs, planers, files, rasps, scrapers, brushes,ways this is done on an industrial scale, the key here is diversity. i get to play withlots of things and ask questions, would a rough glove work, could scientists geneticallyengineer self peeling vegetables or a solution which removes skin. i can have fun with it,which is why product design can be one of the best jobs in the world. with product design,every time i design i get to explore and i feel like i go on an adventure. at this point, all ideas have worth, but admittedlysome are definitely better than others. solutions to remove skin from vegetables may sound daft,but my research shows this has been used commercially
to soften the skin of hard vegetables beforemechanically scraping them. i still want my design to be used in the handand be small enough to fit neatly into a cupboard drawer. i also don't want it to use a motor,as i believe on this occasion it's unnecessary and because i believe product designers havea responsibility to design mass produced items that use less material without affecting functionality. when i look at my current swivel peeler inotice the leading blade, that guides rather than cuts has become worn and dulled frombeing scraped across vegetables. i'm right handed, so this peeler wouldn't work wellfor someone who uses it left handed, which is one reason why everyone has their favouritepeeler. so my first concepts looked at ways
to keep the leading blade sharp by protectingit or having it pivot out of the way. i then looked at ways to adjust the height of theblade or move the guide up and down to get a thicker or thinner peel. trying to get athinner peel led me to investigate saving material by making thinner peelers. most vegetablesare round-ish in section and much much smaller than this plate. even peeling a one millimetredeep slice would only need a blade this wide. but the problem with taking a slimmer sliceis that you have to peel many more times to get around the vegetable. so then i lookedat trying to curve the blade, which is near impossible, or using lots of shorter bladesto make a curve. i can learn a lot from a quick paper model. when this design isn'tkept flat to the vegetable, the back blades
lift so only the front ones keep contact,not very effective. so then i experimented with designs to get the blades to cut in-line. so skipping a few stages, here's my finaldesign. i'm not going to pretend it's brilliant, but hopefully this has been a useful demonstrationabout how simply choosing how to construct a brief can promote innovation. i hope now you see the results from both briefsyou can see that if i'd just stuck with the first brief, i would only have had a verylimited number of concepts that were not just purely aesthetic, where as using the secondbrief you can see that the range of innovative concepts i was able to generate was much larger,by designing with both briefs i get a mild
to wild range of concepts i could then presentto the client, as one brief focuses on defining an object and the other is interested in anoutcome. one final note. not everything you designwill be a success. apple only take forward 2 out of every 10 designs they work on. sometimesyou can't reinvent the wheel, it isn't necessary, there isn't time or budget for it and thereisn't a public demand for it. so choose when to innovate carefully. once you have comeup with something innovative, it may have applications in other areas, so be preparedto capitalise on your hard work. i need to scratch my head on where else i could usethis? ouch, maybe not. i hope you found this episode useful. thisseries takes a while to put together and is
dependant on several factors coming together,so unfortunately i cannot give you a time when the next will be released. the only wayyou are going to be alerted to this if you're interested is to please hit subscribe. thanks for watching.