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Harnessing Material Innovation for a New Design Approach

Material quite literally makes our products. We design for materials, we manufacture materials, and we use and interact with materials in every part of everyday life. Materials form the fundamental substance of all things around us, but more than this, material choice influences things like our responses to the products in-the-hand, the lifetime and longevity of the products, the performance of the product – all of which translate into how we feel and how we act with the products we have. The materials used in the products designed now, will form the objects, items and things in our future and our reaction and actions towards them. Material is an integral choice in the product design journey and when it comes to material selection for a product, there is huge scope to establish a unique and future-focussed product identity.

Using New Materials to Future-proof Your Product Venture

Boosting product function by adding features is a strategy that is frequently revered. This can mean additional components are quick to be integrated or better performing components might be specified and sourced. This is often justified by the belief that the additional product performance benefit will deliver a return on whatever the increased unit cost might be. At the same time, new material exploration or investment is, by comparison, dismissed as a nice-to-have but non-essential.

Nonetheless, while focusing on components may seem the safer, obvious design decision, the properties of many new materials are providing a new approach to creating novel products, one that is more seamless. While extra features could be added and added – sometimes to the detriment of the product’s form and aesthetic – using the qualities of materials as a product USP is an interesting proposition. Material is needed in the product anyway and exploring performance through material can offer more elegant design solutions. Investing in new material opportunities like the incorporation of Graphene coating or the use of conductive thread excitingly brings technology into the product on a material level. Furthermore, as manufacturing with new materials becomes more financially viable, this shift to embracing innovative materials is set to accelerate. When selecting material for use within a new product, asking “will this choice keep my product relevant in a future of new materials”? can be thought-provoking. Knowledge of how you might create originality through material experimentation is one way to future-proof both the product and the business in a climate of material science and innovation and declining raw materials.

How to Explore and Select New Materials for Your Product Design 

Material properties stretch far beyond just tactile feel: manufacturability, function, price-point, expected lifetime and ease of environmental disposal are all aspects that could be positively or negatively influenced by material choice. Thus, material exploration is an opportunity that can be harnessed to design the best possible product, one with individual, considered characteristics. While the considerations listed above may all not be encapsulated yet in one material, the impressive breadth and ground-breaking properties of new materials is exciting interest from designers. With an awareness of the influence of material selection upon the end product, your chief priorities for the product can be balanced and driven forwards. Thinking more broadly than the individual product too, with a design already established, material exploration could help expand, re-invent, or modernise an existing product range. Equally materials could be intelligently used with continuity to shape a recognisable design language across an entire suite of products. Alternatively, product material could even be chosen by users creating a more involved product experience. There is such design potential in the way we use material.

The suitability of an array of versatile materials can be explored in the Foresight phase of a design project, or if material is absolute critical to the product’s viability, a Technical Feasibility work package could be undertaken in the first instance. From a design process perspective, investing in materials research, analysis, and evaluation early-on ensures the design that will be developed is optimal for the specified material. Beyond this, as developments in additive materials continue to improve the accuracy of mimic materials for prototyping, material selection can be carried out with even greater clarity and confidence.

Forget countless unnecessary product features, an openness to material exploration is an exciting and as yet, relatively untravelled, avenue for creating truly novel products. By harnessing the opportunities presented by material developments, new products can achieve distinction in performance, function, and experience as well as originality in the way they do this.

 

Email: gethin@iterate-uk.com

Email: holly@iterate-uk.com

Contact: 01291 408283

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Celebrating 7 Years of ITERATE: Our Take on the Design Sprint

On the 21st of May 2021 ITERATE Design + Innovation turned 7. To mark this business milestone we set out to try something new. Drawing upon recent success trialling the design sprint concept for a Client project, we felt this milestone provided the perfect opportunity to involve the full team at ITERATE in another, bigger design sprint. So, to celebrate our 7 years designing disruptive products, our 7 team members (from design, electronics and marketing) took 7 hours to push the boundaries and see just what we could do. Our ambition was to develop a targeted, considered, purposeful concept by the end of our 7-hour sprint.

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INSIDE ITERATE: New Materials Round Up with Matt Beamish

Our new materials round up has been devised in collaboration with Design Engineer, Matt Beamish; it features some of the most ground-breaking new materials we have either used, encountered or been inspired by recently. Huge strides are being taken to deliver new sustainable materials that don’t demand a compromise in the quality and finish consumers have come to expect. The result of this, is new materials that tackle the heart of the waste crisis with a combination of biochemistry and commercial awareness in order to present viable alternatives.

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The Business Case for Using Additive Parts as Your End-Product

Experimentation and exploration are the hallmarks of innovation. They’re also made more viable for businesses through additive manufacturing. 

Additive manufacturing has long been used and respected as a vital technology within research and development. In particular, 3D printing techniques help product designers validate their ideas through rapid prototyping; this makes it possible to iterate quickly and refine designs within a highly compressed timeline. But the benefits of additive manufacturing don’t end in the world of R&D. In fact, many of its advantages – think flexibility, agility, innovation – are the aspirations of most businesses. Beyond this, the layer by layer composition of additively manufactured parts offers far greater design freedom. The opportunity here? To completely transform the nature of what products can be created. Yet, despite the potential offered by additive as a manufacturing method, still a surprisingly small number of businesses have seized the opportunity to use additively manufactured parts as their end-product.

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Design Registrations: Interview with Michelle Ward, Part Two

Here, we continue our interview with Chartered Trade Mark Attorney Michelle Ward, founder of Indelible IP. Read part one if you haven’t already where we covered the scope of protection provided by a design registration. Michelle’s insights demonstrated that for a relatively low cost and straightforward application process, design registration can provide a lot of value. In part two of the interview our focus shifted to considering design registration from more of a commercial perspective.

 

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Design Registrations: Interview with Michelle Ward, Part One

Recently, Holly and Gethin from the ITERATE team sat down over Zoom to interview Michelle Ward. Michelle is a Chartered Trade Mark Attorney; she has more than 28 years’ experience advising brands on intellectual property. Michelle specialises in trade marks, copyright, design registrations and unregistered design rights and in 2016, founded Indelible IP. Michelle shared her wealth of knowledge on the value of design registrations within the wider IP landscape. She made a compelling case for raising the profile of design registration and explained how this particular design right can be used in clever ways to not only protect your design but also to enrich your brand.

 

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INSIDE ITERATE: Creating Innovative Concepts with Rhydian Dobbin

This “INSIDE ITERATE” thought comes from a conversation with Design Engineer Rhydian Dobbin and provides a window into how we develop concept designs and how in order to create outside-the-box concepts you, in fact, have to step away from the product itself.

Concept development can encompass a broad array of activities from market research to early technical validation. Nonetheless, from “where do you start?” at the beginning to “how do you know which direction to take” at the end, this phase can be perceived as a somewhat intangible. This stage of development is often thought of simply as the ideas stage, but as Rhydian explains, there’s a lot that can be considered and learnt within concept development about what is possible within a given design. There are numerous ways in the concept phase to both push the boundaries and explore the feasibility of an idea. This allows you to analyse options for a product and reach smart decisions through a blend of both blue sky thinking and technical consideration.

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Inside ITERATE: Behind the Scenes of Our Company Video

Today marks the start of a new regular series on our blog; within this series “Inside ITERATE” you’ll find insights from the team, from what’s exciting us most in the design industry at the moment to what we’re thinking about as we develop new products every day. To kick off the series, we’re going behind the scenes of our recently released company video which you can watch here.

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So, you didn’t think you were creative?

As a leading product design agency, we work closely with clients to solve their problems. Our clients are often experts within their field but lack the ability to view existing challenges from an alternative perspective. This isn’t because they lack creativity, but simply because we all get stuck in a rut from time to time, with the repetitive nature of everyday work-life keeping a tight hold on us and our ideas. Read more

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Our Top 5 Product Designers

Product design takes a rare set of skills: The balance of artistic insight with pragmatism, and a deft hand which blends form and function seamlessly together while conveying an overarching sense of meaning.

While the 20th century was truly the renaissance of product design, yielding numerous skilled designers, the following five famous product designers are our personal favourites for the way they have consistently embodied all of the aforementioned qualities whilst also displaying a striking capacity for innovation.

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