PRODUCT DESIGN

If you’re a fan of 99percentinvisible, a podcast on design, then you’d know that all products around you, from an air conditioner to a safety pin, have a story behind them. The story includes everything from the hows and whys that led to the product’s creation, to the joy or disaster caused after the product was released into the market.

Traditionally, Product design was all about creating products which could be mass manufactured. In the past, we’d fuse form and function with a twist of emotion and innovation to create objects that people would love and benefit from. Thus, when people think of product design, they often think - an elegant chair, a well-turned interface or even dramatic architecture. Today we live in a world where anyone can build anything. Designing for the living, thinking, feeling and evolving creatures that inhabit this earth, or outside of it (hat tip to Elon Musk), requires product designers to dip their feet into all kinds of things and often the tags that define what a product designer does, or who a product design is, get muddy. It’s safe to say that if you’ve ever built, tested, shipped, debugged, rebuilt or reshipped anything then you’re a designer.

Studying Product Design in a multi-disciplinary environment like NID teaches you that Design is fundamental. It’s the predilection to investigate and understand. It’s the compulsion to give form to ideas, make sense of disorder and amend the imperfect. Product Design is knowing what questions to ask, and how to ask them. It’s about probing into what is the right problem to solve, how do to solve it, why to solve it? In a world that is empowered by technology, Product Design is also understanding whether something is worth building at all. The world has opened up and the scope of design, along with the role and value of a designer, is up for reinterpretation.

Figure 3. Titan Watches 2018 EDGE Figure 4. Sonata Watches 2018 SLEEK