Product Design: How Fast is Too Fast?
In product design, speed is often what it’s all about. We don’t always have the luxury of making models with perfect design intent. You can’t always make sure you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s for best practice rules. Check to make sure you’ve fully constrained your sketches? Probably not.
In fact, there have been times when the conceptual design isn’t even done yet, and they’re already asking for manufacturing data. So is it lazy? Just too fast? Is it really a bad idea?
Let’s take a look at a model I made as a conceptual model, and didn’t have any time to recreate it with manufacturing in mind. I just had to take what I had and make it work as fast as possible. It’s not ideal, but it’s the reality a lot of product designers face
Here’s something I worked on for a big name housewares company. I visited their office and sat with one of the product managers until we had something on the screen that looked like a product. We were using SolidWorks as a 3D sketch pad.
Actually, we worked through 7 or 8 different styles, with all of the variations on each style (double/single towel rack, coat hook, TP roll holder, shelf, towel ring, etc.). And this was made as a single part. We were just establishing what it looked like.
Then they wanted a drawing. Ok. Here’s a drawing.
Then they wanted an exploded view.
Whoa! This is just a concept, it isn’t a real product yet! We don’t have a material, we don’t have a process, we don’t have a volume or a target cost…
The model had to be split according to different materials (ceramic disks, cast supports and finials, bar stock, OTS fasteners), and then had to be split up again according to manufacturing and assembly concerns (mounting plates for ceramics, mounting screws, drilled holes, countersunk holes for locating rods, wall mounting hardware, etc.)
This was all done in a very non-ideal way. You look at the finished product, and you see a lot of multiple parts. But the way the model was made, it all came from a single solid body. These parts shown in the drawing were all split from the original solid model. I used surface bodies to split the solid, and had to come back with Move Face to add clearance between parts.
In fact, the view was made using the Move Bodies tool and 3D sketches instead of exploded view. The assembly drawing was faked with manually created annotations.
Was this really the most efficient way of working? At some point, it would have made sense to know how far down the rabbit hole we were going. If you’re going all the way, you need to shift gears at some point and make this a real assembly. If you’re just doing a quickie and don’t need the whole drawing, maybe you can get by on just a multi-body model.
I can tell you this was all done at panic speed. If I just had an hour, I could have made this into a real assembly model with multiple instances of individual parts instead of copies of bodies.
This happened because someone who wasn’t really familiar with the CAD process was calling the shots and trying to ram a series of projects through in record time. Eventually I was able to take a step back and do it all correctly, but the drawings for the initial quotes were a little singed around the edges we were ripping so fast through it all.
Conceptually it was so much easier to do it all as a single part, but when it stopped being a visual concept and we were starting to think about how it was going to be made, and what materials were going to be used, we should have changed course. They hired me to do the work because they knew I was fast and flexible, and could handle just about anything they threw at me. But I was definitely grumpy by the end of the day.
You ever run into CAD projects that morph into manufacturing plans before they are really ready?
I find difficulty in general with people who don’t understand the design process.
Either they see some napkin sketches and jottings you did as you were considering different aspects and possible solutions – ideas that very probably weren’t going to be used anyhow – and condemn your talents and early efforts as incompetence, or doubt your ability to deliver at all, or, as per your example, you endeavour to do something neatly and effectively but are in fact working things through – and they immediately seize on it as the finished item. It is difficult to show people that yes their money is being spent well on your services but justify that you might actually go in another direction and that after a further 6 iterations you will have the best practical approach sorted, In general I find it a mistake to show stuff too soon or to ask for opinions on your progress because they really don’t understand what they are seeing or in the context of satisfying a multitude of requirements and many nuances of which they aren’t aware. Probably designers should send clients a brief description of how designers work ahead of time and how you envisage the project will proceed so they appreciate what they are participating in. You definitely don’t want to commit to something you haven’t considered properly because something is bound to go wrong and they will hold you liable for the shortcoming. On the other hand you have to be effective at getting to a working solution and one that they are in tune with.