Product Designer

SHAPE:

The base for every design is rooted in the basic shapes, and being able to utilize their characteristics for what each of them have to offer. In this example of a rapid viz sketch for a new wood clamp design, it is clear that the designer has started with the basic circle, square, and triangle, and exaggerated their form to fit the function of the wood clamp. The handle is made of two semi circles for ergonomics, the clamping mouth has a square profile to make the bite more effective, and the hinge is made of two over lapping triangles. Without a grasp of the form of each of the basic shapes, a product designer will be unable to apply the user's needs to the reality of a tangible product.

SCALE:

For a product designer, scale is very important to the design process because it will fully effect the success of the end product. If you get the size of elements of the design out of proportion to others, the product will not have a consistent design language and the user will not be able to read it. One of the spectacular new advantages available to product designers today are rapid prototyping machines like 3D printers, which can produce design prototypes of an scale, smaller then the end product and even up to full sized components. This tool is amazing for a product designer because they are able to produce their designs into tangible objects at a fraction of the time it would take with traditional methods. With the ability to create each component of the design to full scale, a designer today should never have the problem of producing something that just doesn't fit.

LINE:

Starting at the beginning of every design are lines, that are connected to make shapes. This process, as it may sound easy in the previous statement, is very difficult to visualize without the proper understanding of how individual lines will be able to construct a solid object. The image above is a CAD drawing that I made for the Intro to Computer Drafting class and I believe that it is a great example of how line is used in the design process for a product. To start this drawing I had to join lines at their endpoints perpendicular to each other in order to form the square shape. I also had to utilize parallel lines to project the top view of the component to the front view.