"To whom should you turn for good design?"
Dieser Frage gingen wir in den "Kölner Technische Mitteilungen" des VDI auf den Grund.
“Pimp your product”
“To whom should you turn for good design?”
To begin with, if you're looking for good design, you're not looking for an artist. How should you tell the one from the other? Perhaps it comes down to the extent of the details in the specifications you're preparing. The less an artist knows about a project, the more freedom he might have to express his own personality. That’s good if you're producing art.
A good designer, on the other hand, will be very nosy about your product’s technical, functional, ergonomical, emotional, social, and economic as well as aesthetic aspects. The more a designer learns about your project, the more precisely the result will fit your production requirements and your marketing strategies. And that’s what you need above all to produce a “seller”. With good design, the end-product is always functional and 100% user-friendly, meaning it can be operated intuitively.
Another indication of an effective designer is the extent to which a first, detailed conversation can already help in solving your problem. If someone wants to save all his good ideas until after you have signed a contract, it might be a sign that he just can’t afford to waste his few good ideas up front.
But don’t expect design to be free of charge, either. A set percentage of the overall product development costs should be reserved for professional design. Look at the kind of work the designer has done in the past and keep this in focus: A well-designed product says more about its producing company and its users than about its designer. Among other things, success requires that the designer understood them well. We at :echtform - Industrial Design & Consultancy, consider ourselves to be development partners for our customers. We certainly strive to appreciate art, but it's not something we sell.
Unfortunately, anyone can call himself a designer. In this line of work, there is no professional association or code of law regulating the use of this word as an occupational title. This has historical roots. Many Bauhaus teachers had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. For lack of a better translation of the German word “Gestalter”, they chose the term “designer”. Up to this time, the designation had carried a solely technical meaning, analogous to “engineer”. With the growing fame of the Bauhaus tradition and its return to Germany after the war, the idiom “Gestalter” was re-imported as “Designer”, and as with many Anglicisms the designation was adopted as such into the German language. Since then, the design profession has failed to establish industry standards for accreditation. This situation stands in contrast, for example, to the architectural profession where a title guarantees a high quality standard. Imagine that anyone could call himself an architect. How, then, would you choose someone to plan and construct your house?
Nevertheless, you have good chances of achieving a product design that can meet your expectations. Trust in your chosen designer’s capability to understand your technical requirements. And call on him early in the process! Successful product development means engineers, designers and marketers working hand-in-hand from start to end.
Dieser Frage gingen wir in den "Kölner Technische Mitteilungen" des VDI auf den Grund.
“Pimp your product”
“To whom should you turn for good design?”
To begin with, if you're looking for good design, you're not looking for an artist. How should you tell the one from the other? Perhaps it comes down to the extent of the details in the specifications you're preparing. The less an artist knows about a project, the more freedom he might have to express his own personality. That’s good if you're producing art.
A good designer, on the other hand, will be very nosy about your product’s technical, functional, ergonomical, emotional, social, and economic as well as aesthetic aspects. The more a designer learns about your project, the more precisely the result will fit your production requirements and your marketing strategies. And that’s what you need above all to produce a “seller”. With good design, the end-product is always functional and 100% user-friendly, meaning it can be operated intuitively.
Another indication of an effective designer is the extent to which a first, detailed conversation can already help in solving your problem. If someone wants to save all his good ideas until after you have signed a contract, it might be a sign that he just can’t afford to waste his few good ideas up front.
But don’t expect design to be free of charge, either. A set percentage of the overall product development costs should be reserved for professional design. Look at the kind of work the designer has done in the past and keep this in focus: A well-designed product says more about its producing company and its users than about its designer. Among other things, success requires that the designer understood them well. We at :echtform - Industrial Design & Consultancy, consider ourselves to be development partners for our customers. We certainly strive to appreciate art, but it's not something we sell.
Unfortunately, anyone can call himself a designer. In this line of work, there is no professional association or code of law regulating the use of this word as an occupational title. This has historical roots. Many Bauhaus teachers had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. For lack of a better translation of the German word “Gestalter”, they chose the term “designer”. Up to this time, the designation had carried a solely technical meaning, analogous to “engineer”. With the growing fame of the Bauhaus tradition and its return to Germany after the war, the idiom “Gestalter” was re-imported as “Designer”, and as with many Anglicisms the designation was adopted as such into the German language. Since then, the design profession has failed to establish industry standards for accreditation. This situation stands in contrast, for example, to the architectural profession where a title guarantees a high quality standard. Imagine that anyone could call himself an architect. How, then, would you choose someone to plan and construct your house?
Nevertheless, you have good chances of achieving a product design that can meet your expectations. Trust in your chosen designer’s capability to understand your technical requirements. And call on him early in the process! Successful product development means engineers, designers and marketers working hand-in-hand from start to end.