150: Building Product Prototypes with Your Design Team

Robert Irwin is currently the lead industrial designer for Origyn LLC, an external R&D partner of the multinational company Haier. He was the past Senior INdusdtrial Designer at Amazon for their shopping cart products. He is also a fellow lecturer in the design industry. Today Robert is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can first understand how to manage your product design and prototyping team, then work with them to develop physical prototypes to perfect your product for both manufacturing and the end-customer.Today you will hear us talk about:
Empathy in the design process with various stakeholders
Listening to your potential customer, but also to your design team and other product development stakeholders.
Be careful about compartmentalizing features, they need to all come together via a hardware product prototype.
Iterative loop in design, engineering, and prototyping your hardware product
Good prototyping relies on great design, and design that is done right to start with.
After a professionally built CAD design is done as far as you can push it, then build a physical prototype of the invention, but keep that first prototype relatively rough and simple, such as through 3D printing.
You don’t need to make a fully functional prototype to start getting feedback
Never skip the iterative process in developing the product, and ensure to use multiple prototypes that increase in complexity and quality as you get closer to manufacturing.
You are de-risking the failure of the product by properly developing your product.
Fail early and fail often
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