14May

UK Manufacturing

Interesting to hear Trunki are moving some production back to the UK.

Main reasons quoted;

  • Quicker response time for new orders
  • Good quality workmanship
  • Costs rising in the Far East (Wages have tripled in China in recent years!)
8May

Product animation services

4D Products are now offering product animation services alongside our core design activities. Product animations and videos are a great way to showcase your product. They can also be uploaded to searchable sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, creating a buzz and more links back to you and your products.
Animations are also a great way to review the look of a product. Get valuable feedback from clients, colleagues and stakeholders before committing to manufacture where changes become more costly.

We will be uploading example pieces to our website soon, so keep an eye out!

Get in touch if you would like to discuss animating your products.

12Apr

Made in the UK?

Wondering what is still made in the UK? Here is an interesting piece from the good old BBC on the subject.

MADE IN THE UK

With fuel and labour costs rising in the Far East, we should see a rise in the UK’s manufacturing competitiveness. 4D are keen to use UK based suppliers where possible.

12Apr

Biomedical Catalyst Funding

“A £180 million government fund to help innovative small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and academics to develop solutions to healthcare challenges will open for applications at the end of April.

The Biomedical Catalyst is a key element of the Strategy for Life Sciences launched by the Prime Minister in December last year.  It will see the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Technology Strategy Board working together to take the best British medical breakthroughs through to commercial success.

The Biomedical Catalyst will be open to SMEs and academics, and will accept proposals from sectors that have the potential to provide significant positive healthcare and economic impact.  It will support the development of innovative technologies emerging from partnerships between clinicians, academics and industry.

Three categories of grant awards will be available through the Biomedical Catalyst scheme – feasibility, early stage and late stage.  Any SME or academic undertaking research and development, either individually or working in collaboration, may apply and applications will be accepted at any time.   Individual grants to businesses will range from a maximum of £150,000 for feasibility awards to £3 million for early and late stage awards.” - Mersey Bio News 12April2012

30Mar

Product Design Awards

Why not visit http://awards.designweek.co.uk/dw/2012/entry-showcase-13.html to see one of our recent project in the Design Week product design awards show case. Fingers crossed for a good results!

Product_design_awards

 

29Mar

Design for your customers

How do you know if your new product will appeal to your customers?

We supply Product Design to a range of clients in many different situations. Not everyone understands their target customers as well as they could.
If you are fortunate enough to have regular contact with existing customers, they can be a valuable source of feedback and ideas. If every customer is crying out for something they cant currently get, it is a golden opportunity to supply something new to a ready made market.
If you are developing a new product it can be easy to make assumptions about what the end user wants, either through personal opinions or being blinkered by what the competition is doing.
A great way to understand your target market is to observe how they currently solve the problem your new product is addressing. They may be;

  • Using a competitors product
  • Struggling through without a solution
  • Not realise a problem exists
  • Not realise or believe their problems can be solved
In any of these situations why not identify a group of ‘friendly’ target users who do whatever it is your product will do, vacuuming a carpet, organising workspace, taking blood from a patient, etc. Observe and record how users complete the task, the things they do to work around features that don’t work with their current product, the features on their current product that just don’t perform or aren’t of use anyway.

Armed with this kind of data the design team can propose solutions that actually solve the end users problems, not just copy the competition or refresh the current design assuming it does everything the customer needs.
The benefits of the product should then appeal to your customers and be real incentives to make a purchase. This is one of several methods utilised by our design team to understand end users and design better products.

29Mar

Anyone for Raspberry Pi?

An intriguing concept intended to increase interest in computer programming from an early age.

Designed in the UK, The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video and costs only £21.60!

The theory goes that programming knowledge has declined since the good old days of BBCs, Sinclair Spectrums, and Commodore 64s, when kids could experiment by writing programs for their home computers. Students entering computer based university courses now have more experience using spreadsheets and writing web pages due to school curriculum’s. Not much use when you want to create something new from scratch.

28Feb

What could winning Product Design awards do for your business?

There are many Product Design Awards over the calendar year, and most other industries will have their share of awards too. Have you ever entered one of your products in a competition?

We recently entered a new hand held electronic device into the Design Week Awards 2012.

Why? Well we don’t have particularly large egos, but is always nice if the work you do gets recognition. But the real opportunity is one of marketing. The very fact we have entered the awards gives us something positive to talk about, and suggests we are delivering high quality work worthy of consideration in a national competition. Imagine if we were to win! The product, the company who own it, and our design capabilities will receive national press for all the right reasons.

Any business can talk about their own merits, USPs, etc, but it will always carry more weight if the positive words come from an unbiased third party with industry knowledge.

When you look at your product range, do you feel it’s worthy of competing for an award against others in your sector? If not, perhaps its time for change.

The MD of a medical diagnostics business once told us he wanted his products “to be the Apple Computers of our industry”. We are certainly up for a challenge, and that particular project recently won first place in a plastics design industry competition. Great PR for the client, their product, and the design team.

13Feb

Make It In Great Britain

“Make it in Great Britain Challenge, a national competition to find the most promising and cutting-edge British pre-market products or processes, it will culminate in an exhibition which celebrates the best of British manufacturing, held at the Science Museum, to coincide with the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The exhibition will highlight the successes of the manufacturing sector, show the true face of British manufacturing and encourage young people to consider a career in the industry.”

CLICK TO READ MORE…

8Feb

Mountain Bike Video Cameras

I got out on my Marin mountain bike for the first time this year recently. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, which had brought plenty of other cyclists out.

As a product designer, I like keep an eye on what gadgets and accessories cyclists have with them.

One thing that is becoming more common are helmet mounted video cameras. This isn’t surprising considering peoples interest in posting a record of any and all their activities on Youtube or Facebook. Considering most people now carry smart phones too, I am surprised I cant find any products which connect a camera to the smart phone and make use of its screen for playback, its internal memory for storage, and its internet connectivity for uploading content to social media sites before the ride is even finished.

Anyone out there know of such a device / system?

Of course with our design expertise, we may just build something ourselves to do the job…Watch this space.

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