Product Design Essay

954 Words2 Pages

Introduction The field of product design has a rich history of evolving as artists many centuries ago into computer gurus today, who are able to utilize computer software to compute designs. The processes of product design include a field continuously evolving in terms of technology and skills required in the industry. Product designers today must adhere to a fundamental belief to constantly progress, improve, and create in order to be relevant in today’s society. Discussion The Relevance of Product Design. According to Sater-Black & Iversen (1994), “It is estimated that 80% of future production decisions and costs are determined by product design”(Mar 1994). It is important, keeping that basic understanding in mind, to keep the quality of …show more content…

Product designers centuries ago were referred to as artisans. Artisans would come up with the design, form, and function of an object and then assign this job to a person with the relevant skills. This term evolved in the 18th century, the industrial revolution commenced and shifted from the previous way objects were designed and created. This was the beginning of the product design and industrial field being more categorized in the engineering industry. In the mid-1940’s, the fine-tuning of the drafting standards availed product designers to have the ability to create design intent in their designs to for easy transferability to the prototyping department. This included the creation of tolerances and the drafting symbols so individuals prototyping the product could understand what the designer wanted and had a set of instructions to …show more content…

CAD, computer-aided design, originating after WWII in 1957, was born. This program allowed software to aid in the design of products created a standard user interface and incorporate tools to help designers create their product. In the 1970’s, 2D CAD design evolved into 3D CAD design and was taken more seriously, being incorporated into automotive, aerospace, and other industries (Miller, 1897). A little later, Autodesk formed and released their first significant program in 1983 for an IBM PC (Ottosson, 1998). For the past centuries, engineers had been using complex mathematical and scientific equations which were made completely irrelevant within a decade with the introduction and improvement of CAD modeling. Fast forward to today, Autocad is still a leading CAD modeling program and has included many pertinent features allowing designers to perform an analysis, gather data from a mock stress and heat test, view the product in other materials, virtual reality, and more relevant tools, all before even creating their first prototype (Miller,

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