Industrial Design
Advice for product innovation, design, and development
Consumer Medical Devices: 5 Design Practices for Usability
Medical device companies can boost usability by adopting these consumer product development practices.
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Eight Essential Prototypes: The Nesting and Stacking Approach to Product Development
While a final product may appear to stand on its own, it’s actually buoyed by tiers of development. These include rounds of prototyping and testing.
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Design That Clicks: The Art and Science of Tactile Feedback
A click is a universally recognized cue that an action is complete. Here's how to get the right sound and feel.
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How We Do It: Virtual Reality for Better, Faster Prototyping
Farewell, foam core mockups?
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Calm Technology in the Era of Push Notifications
In a world of “ubiquitous computing,” how might technology communicate information without hijacking a person’s attention?
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On-Ramp To IoT: Anatomy of a Connected Product
Connecting a device to the Internet adds layers of complexity.
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What the Medical Device Industry Can Learn from Consumer Product Development Practices
Today’s users of medical devices expect a consumer-level experience. How can medtech firms make the shift?
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Making Wearables That Stick
A bottom-line approach drives meaningless products. Here are four guidelines for making meaningful wearable tech.
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Use Miller’s Law When Presenting Design Concepts
It’s not uncommon for a new client to want to see 20 or 30 concepts during the initial design phase, believing this represents better value.
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Using Digital-Physical Workflows to Master Integrated Product Design
Digital-physical workflows help us envision what needs to happen in the digital world and the physical world, as well as where the two need to work together.
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How Does ‘Hick’s Law’ Apply to Product Design?
Regardless of what you're designing, the options you present to users should be simple and straightforward.
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Ingenious Engineering: Ballpoint Pens
The ballpoint pen eliminated the need for messy fountain pens and all the problems that came with them. This breakthrough invention forever changed the way we write.
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Design Lessons from 4 Early Wearables That Didn’t Quite Hit the Mark
These early attempts at wearable technology were innovative but flawed—and paved the way for the more advanced devices we have today.
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How to Use High-Fidelity Prototyping for Soft Goods
You’ve vetted your MVP design through low and medium-fidelity prototypes. Now use high-fidelity prototypes to amplify your MVP into a truly compelling offering.
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What Taylor Swift Can Teach Product Designers About Experiential Brand Language
I just spent six months researching experiential brand language for a client. Here's what it is, how to create it, and examples of great EBLs from Apple, Airbnb, REI, and, as the title promises, Taylor Swift.
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How to Use Low- and Mid-Fidelity Prototyping for Soft Goods
It’s important to prototype and test soft materials at various stages in the product development process.
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Touchscreens Become Tactile
Touchscreens are now tactile. This may have big implications for medical devices and vehicle infotainment systems, where safety and error-reduction are paramount.
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When to Use Soft Goods in Product Design
To develop the best version of your product, have you considered leveraging softer materials?
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Why Multidisciplinary Teams Design Better Products
A multidisciplinary team has the edge in creating innovative, well-rounded solutions that meet the needs of all stakeholders.
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19 Uses for AI in Product Development
The Delve team explores AI’s place in our product development process.
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7 Ways to Design Better Products for Women
How do you design better products for women? Our female researchers, designers and engineers compiled seven principles for individuals and companies to consider.
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How to Design a Medical Device as Safe as an MRI and as Intuitive as a Nest
Medical device manufacturers need to design for a new kind of user. This has big implications not just for the devices they design but also for how they do business.
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3 Surprising Findings from Our Latest MedTech Industry Survey
While reviewing the early data from our ongoing research on trends in the medical device industry, three unexpected findings caught our eye.
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How the Consumerization of Healthcare is Transforming Medical Device Design
Patients are becoming empowered consumers of healthcare. They bring to medical devices the high expectations formed from their experiences with highly intuitive consumer products—as well as greater risk.
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If You Could Redesign Anything, What Would It Be?
Not every product design is a home run. Here are 15 products we think could use some design help.
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A Better Way to Develop a Medical Device with Digital and Physical Elements (Part 1 of 2)
Next-generation medical devices with hardware-software interactions need a new, holistic development methodology.
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Biggest Innovations in 2022 That Influenced Product Design
A coffee pod system without a plastic pod. Headphones that read your mind. A touch-sensitive prosthetic hand. Check out the biggest innovations to influence product design in 2022.
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3 Product Design Best Practices to Follow
How to create a successful product – whether you're designing a product that's physical, digital, or somewhere in between.
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2021's Top 10 Innovation and Product Design Posts
In 2021 you devoured blogs about looking at old problems in new ways, unlocking your professional potential, and creating products that change the world for the better.
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Four Steps to the “Right” Color in Product Design
We developed a color selection methodology that applies user-first design thinking to finding the right color in product design.
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Four Ways to Win the Future of MedTech Wearables
Soaring demand for wearables has created a market saturated with the things—prompting an 18.1 percent year-over-year growth worldwide, according to Gartner.
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How to design for positive, humanity-scale impact
A simple open-sourced design had a massive social impact—40 million face shields were produced for front-line workers fast and without expensive tooling investments.
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Ingenious Engineering: How Staples Are Made
It’s not easy keeping it together under pressure. Yet these little marvels do it every day tens of thousands of times over. Do you know how staples are made?
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Use ‘Jobs, Outcomes, and Constraints’ to Exploit the Pause Between Research and Ideation
The JOC method lets you move into ideation confident that you're working from something more than a hunch.
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How Digital Whiteboards Became the Design Tool of 2021
More than just compensating for the loss of in-person collaboration, digital whiteboards provide clear benefits, namely reducing barriers between disciplines and fostering more open, dynamic relationships with clients.
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Design for Manufacturing: 7 Things Every Designer Should Know
Designers and engineers share responsibility for design for manufacturing (DFM), or designing products for optimized manufacturing ease and cost.
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Affordable PPE for the developing world
The Badger Shield has shown that a distributed supply chain can create massive quantities of effective and cost-effective personal protective equipment (PPE) in a short time. Can this model translate to the developing world if COVID-19 cases start to rise in African, SE Asian and Latin American urban centers?
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Face shield designs to fill the gap
We are all feeling a little helpless in the face of COVID-19. We are looking for ways to help. Face shield shortages are putting health workers at risk.
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How you can help design succeed
Over the years, there have been designers still young in their careers that have come to me looking for advice and ideas of what to do next. They’ve all told me their tales of woe about how design is just not respected or understood where they work. And this, of course, coincides with their (and design’s) struggle to find a solid footing within the organization.
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CES 2020: Day two
Our team spent the second day of CES at Tech West, home base for health, wellness, home, wearable and fitness technology. It's also the hub for Eureka Park, where the scrappy startups vie for attention of venture capitalists and potential partners.
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Making something awesome
I’d like to take the time and opportunity to reflect on our experiences at the Madison Mini Maker Faire and talk about each of the wonderful projects our team at Delve has been able to put together to share with the public, while hopefully inspiring young minds to be open and grow.
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Cybertruck, schmeibertruck…
I, for one, am pretty excited that Elon Musk is bringing his 1980s sci-fi movie dreams to life.
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Will it recycle?
Have you ever considered what happens to the materials you put into the recycling bin after they are picked up from your curb?
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How Anthropomorphic Form Shapes Product Design
Humans are drawn to anthropomorphic form in product design. Here's how industrial and interaction designers can use this as a tool.
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How Does Product Design Enable the Circular Economy?
For the circular economy to work, we need system-wide innovation, and that will require rethinking and redefining our products and services.
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Goodbye Industrial, Hello Design
I’d prefer to never say words Industrial Designer
again.
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Designing Military-Grade Products: The What, Why, and How
With the growing demand for rugged design across sectors, product developers need help figuring out when to accommodate military specifications.
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How to Use Mapping to Determine the Design of Your Controls
Good mapping makes products easier and more intuitive to use. Done well, it can create a powerful connection between a product and its users.
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What Does 'Hierarchy of Needs' Mean To Product Designers?
How can product designers apply Maslow's theory of human motivation to their work? A design won't succeed if it doesn't meet users' most basic needs.
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What’s a ‘Nudge’ in Product Design?
Nudge is a concept rooted in behavioral science that describes how minor changes in product design can markedly affect individual behavior.
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VR: From “Dactyl” to Practical
From a '90s novelty to an exciting design tool, virtual reality offers client-facing opportunities for design immersion.
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Is this on brand?
The San Francisco team has been enthusiastically involved in the design of our new space
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Four Ways to Work More Collaboratively with Interaction Designers
Designing appliances increasingly involves and interaction design component. How do you integrate this skill into your development process effectively?
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The Why, How, and When of Co-Creation During the Product Development Process
Co-creation means inviting users into your creative process. Users, instead of being subjects of study, gain agency and become active participants in the design process.
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Industrial Design’s Past, Present, and Future: The Evolution of a Profession
Delve's VP of Design Mathieu Turpault reflects on major changes in industrial design in the last 25 years and predicts where it's headed.
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Just one touch and I knew ...
I have this distinct memory from my childhood: I’m lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, cozied up in yellow and orange-ish shag carpet. Dust floats lazily through a sunbeam that peeks through the heavy velour curtains. A clock ticks steadily but softly from the other side of the room. My right hand is rotating the large machined aluminum tuning knob on my grandfather’s hi-fi tuner – back and forth, back and forth.
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How to Leverage Aesthetic Design Trends in Product Design
There are many different types of trends you can and should reference throughout the new product design and development process. Aesthetic design trends may be some of the harder nuts to crack.
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The Good Enough Design of the Nintendo Switch
The Nintendo Switch has a lot of great features, but the modular design leads to some clunky compromises. Ultimately, does it matter?
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Your brand deserves a language
How do we know the difference between a designer handbag and a knockoff?
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Favorite Things: Diptyque Philosykos Solid Perfume
As product designers, Design Concepts staff are always looking at the things that surround them with an eye for the exceptional.
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Suck up ... tear down
A neighbor of mine left this
stunning post-war (~1950) Electrolux XXX at their curb. I snatched it,
immediately hoping to convert it to a table lamp. I was blown away by the
industrial design and the workmanship.
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Designing Handheld Devices That Don’t Hurt
What's behind the lack of useful thumb-reach and hand-grip data for designers of handheld devices, and how can designers gather their own?
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Game on: The best of the boards
What can I say; I’m a bit of nerd when it comes to board games.
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Embracing the Old School
I love to BBQ! I’m not talking a Sunday afternoon burgers on the grill. I’m talking pork shoulder, ribs and brisket. The kind of food you have to cook low and slow for hours over smoke-infused fire.
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Details, details, details ...
Living in Wisconsin I find that I need to have a certain mindset to embrace the change of seasons and prepare for the inevitable cold and snow that will eventually blanket the Midwest. Typical annual rituals for me involve putting snow tires on the car, winterizing the lawn mower and digging the snow blower out of the shed.
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Why Designers Are Not Artists
Making a difference and calling attention to important issues through design is more achievable once designers get over the fact that they're not artists.
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Working Toward Sustainable Medical Device Design
'Our healthcare system is unsustainable.' People who say this are usually speaking in terms of cost. But it’s also true in terms of medical device design.
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"Delve brings strengths that we don't have, which is why I'm looking forward to working with them again."
Vamsee Pamula, Founder & President, Baebies