Product Design Simplified
Collection of introductory knowledge on Product Design. Curated as a complimentary for the Workshop on Product Design for Grad Students in Computer Science, who has never exposed to any sort of design education.
What is Product Design
There are many pieces of evidence, (specially base on how leading academic institutes have positioned their Product Design departments or courses) that modern product design approaches have been influenced by theoretical concepts and research done in the field of Industrial Design. Therefore, to understand the meaning of product design, one can focus on ideologies presented in design as well as industrial design. There are many world class design schools, universities, institutions and forums, But the following 4 ideologies are considered to be the favorites among most of the product designers.
Stanford Design Thinking
Stanford Design School or as d.school (Stanford d.school) is considered to be the number one educational institute for modern Product Design. Famously denoted the five diamonds for various activity buckets, Stanford Design Thinking is the most commonly known approach in Product Design.
Empathize is focusing on the context to find insights for design where as define focuses on techniques that support defining a design challenge. Ideate, prototype and test focuses on generating designs, prototyping them and testing with users.
Even thought there are tons of articles on design thinking, the best way to learn Stanford Design Thinking methodology is by following free crash course by d.school itself. The video makes you practice design thinking step by step. It is recommended to dedicate one and half hours and follow this crash course. They recommend to get at least one other person, plus some materials.
the list of items you need, worksheets and other resources can be downloaded from: https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/virtual-crash-course-video
by any-chance if you didn’t managed to download the worksheets they used during the course: https://dschool.stanford.edu/s/Participant-Worksheet.pdf
Most of the students who are new to design, often finds it bit harder to understand the logical arrangement and the concepts behind each stage of the above workshop video. Hence familiarizing with each card of the d.school Bootleg is essential.
When someone has general idea about the Stanford design thinking, it is very common to find them consider it as five step process. This must read post by Director of Learning at d.school Carissa Carter clearly indicates otherwise,
British Design Council Double Diamond
The British Design Council (formerly known as Council of Industrial Design) has been in operation since 1944, is famously known among Product Designers for their Double Diamond approach. Double Diamond by Design Council is a very important ideology anyone who wants to understand product design. A basic level introduction to Double Diamond can be found at,
Double Diamond presents four distinct stages a designer pass when they move from the Problem to Solution, while diverging and converging at each stage. this is known as Divergent Thinking and Convergent Thinking.
As a Product Designer, divergent and convergent thinking hats are very important. In some situations they need to generate new concepts and move into different directions. At the same time they need to converge and make decisions.
Delft Design Approach
Technische Universiteit Delft, or TU Delft is known among designers for its prestigious in Industrial Design education and Delft Design Guide. The Design Approach by Delft may appears to be more traditional, but as an student to design, one may find it easy to comprehend compared to other ideologies due to two main reasons: Delft team has created many MOOC programs targeting beginner students and secondly waterfall like nature of the content makes it easy to understand the profession of design.
While highly recommending you to invest on a Delft Design Guide, you can get to know the approach by following MOOC on Edx
IDEO Human Centered Design
Unlike other 3 institutes, IDEO.org is not a University or a Charity that focuses on Academic research. IDEO is the worlds leading design consultancy firm with very strong short courses for designers, and considered to be the industry leader in educational programs related to design.
Inspiration is all about understanding people, observing them, hopes and desires. This phase will help the designer to understand the design challenge better setting the stage for a greater design. Under Ideation designer will converge into opportunities to design, generate ideas, test them and refine the designs. Implementation phase the designer will bring the designs to life and think about taking to the market and maximize the impact.
Human Centered Design approach to product design is further explained in the following video.
A highlight in IDEO HCD is their focus in building creative confidence among designers.
Creative Confidence is the notion that you have big ideas, and that you have ability to act on them — David Kelley, Founder IDEO
Listen TED Talks on Creative Confidence by Kelley,
This page maintained by IDEO lists many invaluable resources for Product Design students
Including the list of design tools named Design Kit
Printed Method Cards from IDEO will handy for a new designer
and remember to download or Buy the Field guide for Human Centered Design
So, What is Product Design?
Generalizing these 4 different ideologies into one framework would be pointless as the existence of different ideologies is an implication of fundamental differences of each school of thought. However, as someone new to Product Design, you may want a simplified framework that goes inline with all of the above concepts. There are many authors who tired this exercise and Dan Nessler’s famous article on Medium is one of such example.
Dan Nessler article sums up and combined Double Diamond, Design Thinking and Human Centered Design ideologies in the best possible way. However, it needs to be pointed out that Dan’s effort to fit non-process based ideologies into to left to right process has clearly lost many important aspects of each approach to be lost in translation. Therefore, it is recommended to read it with care and use it only as a platform to compare each approach. Another key missing part of the above article is techniques from old school industrial design approaches such as Delft Design Approach.
Product Design Simplified
Product design approaches should not be simplified. It is a crime! Simplification makes valuable information as well as the essence of how it has been presented by each respected school of thoughts to be lost. Having said that, as someone relatively new to Product Design could get overwhelmed with the presentation of different approaches.
Design is not a linear set of activities. despite some of the above approaches presented in linear way, it shouldn’t be interpreted as step by step process that moves from been empathized to user testing.
In all leading product design ideologies there are two common characteristics. They have,
- 3 Common Knowledge Areas, that focuses on accomplishing 3 important objectives.
- Each area consists of two tool buckets to diverge and converge.
3 Areas
There are three main goals any Product Designer tries to achieve. They wants to
- Know what to design
- Ideate and Pick the best idea
- Let their Product fit into the ecosystem they designed for
What to design (Research and Define)
Product Designers, irrespective of whether they are working on a Design initiative, looks for things they can be solved by designing. They use one set to tools to diverge into many areas, situations for insights. Stanford call this Empathize while others use terms such as Discover, Research, Inspiration, or Understanding the Context of use.
While diverging, they tries to converge by eliminating or connecting insights into Design Challenge. Different methods uses terms such as, Define, Inspiration, Area of focus.
Ideas and Pick good ideas
When design challenge starting to take shape, designers start generating ideas. the key objective is to diverge into many possible idea pool. they may write them down, draw them or even prepare mock-ups.
Designers often combine, eliminate ideas and Converge back to limited, if not one best idea using various decide techniques.
Product fits to its’ ecosystem
When designers have pick a best idea, they move into think about implementation or production of the idea. They visualize the idea using detail sketching techniques, prototyping and even building a sample product. Initially they would diverge with the idea by evaluating various build options.
As the last bucket they will test the idea with users to evaluate and eventually decide whether the design is successful.
