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Welcome to Product Design at NUIM!
What is Product Design?
Product Designers create new products that people are delighted to use. Product Design bridges the gap between technology and market "the innovation gap" in a human-centred way. In this way, Product Design enables a faster and more successful route to market for technology-based new products. This is why good Product Design is at the heart of successful product innovation, and is increasingly valued by creative and entrepreneurial businesses.
Have you got a favourite MP3 player, mobile phone, website, home movie system, computer game, digital camera, or any other everyday product? What characteristics distinguish, for you, your favourite brands from their competitors? What makes one brand of electronic product better or more successful with users in general than others? How did the successful designers achieve that distinction while others failed? And, when many competing products basically use the same technology, what is it that distinguishes one product positively from the others?
Product Design is the difference between success and failure for products in competitive markets. Product Designers apply creative and artistic skills combined with a thorough understanding of technology and materials, and a sensitive awareness of human needs and behaviour to create a product that satisfies, even delights, its users. User satisfaction is measured in terms of functionality, ergonomics, aesthetics and finance (cost).
Professional engineers solve technical problems through rigorous analysis and application of existing and new technologies. Marketing professionals research and understand human needs and desires in order to identify the focus of activity for a business or project. The role of the Product Designer is to work with marketers to identify and interpret the specific needs of the targeted user (market), to creatively design the concept of a product that will satisfy those needs and to work with engineers and technologists to bring into reality the new product design.