6 minute read
Enjoying the Contraints | Saikat Biswas
Saikat Biswas
Director, Industrial Design, Empoise
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Saikat studied industrial design with the specialization in product design from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India and Pforzheim University of Applied Science, Germany.
He worked for some of the largest global consumer electronics companies around the globe, his projects are of a varied spectrum, from creating mobile phones to designing trains. In 2010 he co-founded Empoise, one of the leading Industrial Design Studios from India that has collaborated with companies ranging from stealth mode startups to Global Fortune 500 brands like Samsung, GE, Cisco, Schneider, Qualcomm, Tata, Reliance, Wipro, Videocon, Lava, Luminous, Zebra, and many more!
From the vantage point of a design student or a young designer, design constraints often seem like a limit to ‘unbridled creativity’. However, in reality, design constraints are usually the clues that give a structure to the design process, maneuver it, and actually inspire innovation. I will make the case for how design constraints, used consciously, can be not a foe but a friend during the design process.
Every object that we interact with daily is the result of a design process shaped by its constraints and context. During this process, myriad decisions are made by the industrial designers and their teams, aimed at improving our life through well-executed designs.
Design constraints are conditions that need to happen for a project to be successful. These constraints help to narrow down choices while working on a project. Many different kinds of constraints - business goals, budget, timeline, technical specs, target users’ needs and aspirations, design principles and brand design guidelines - shape our solutions to design problems.
With so many different types of constraints, it is certain that some of them may conflict with one another in a particular design project and this can often feel limiting, especially for the young designer. Making the appropriate design tradeoffs to resolve conflicting constraints requires dexterity and good judgment that comes with experience.
What is interesting is that design innovation is often driven by the interplay of these constraints during the design process. This is why the design constraints are not restraints but factors that help designers and foster creativity! Design constraints should be seen as a set of clues that help designers triangulate between the problems, resources, and criteria inherent in every project and prevent precious time wasted on extraneous design concepts.
How we do it at Empoise
Since 2010, every project we have worked on at Empoise has been shaped by design constraints, perhaps more than any other factor. A good example of bringing innovation and making a design unique is the Coin Mesh Network Sensors we designed a few years ago.
Coin is a tiny device for real-time asset & people tracking, condition monitoring, smart home, and office & security solutions. It forms a peer-to-peer mesh network of tiny low-cost sensor nodes that can be used for diverse applications. A gateway assigned to these Coins collects data and transfers information to the API over Wifi or GPRS.
The design is simple and compact with a single multi-colour RGB LED to show the various options for the status of the device. The silicone casing makes the device splash and weather-resistant, and this provides a good example of how design constraints or limitations can shape the final design to make it unique and iconic.
The device needed to be IP rated (water and dustproof) as it would be used in indoor, outdoor, dusty and humid conditions. In an ideal situation, we would have made the mechanical design IP rated (with silicone or elastomer gasket built-in to resist dust and water) that would have required double-shot injection moulding and also more development time to accommodate the trial and errors in the prototype and pre-production stages before going to production.
However, the company that made Coin was a small startup from India and did not have a budget to accommodate such development costs and production investments. So we resorted to another approach - of making an outer silicone sleeve, made with a lower investment that works almost as good as any other expensive solution without hindering any functionality of the device significantly. As a result of the constraints, we derived a final design with a unique translucent and double-layered look that we did not think of during the initial ideation and concept development phase. Had we not faced such limitations, we would have gone with a typical IP-rated design approach that would work well, but may not stand out.
In summary
“Design depends largely on constraints. … Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible, and his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints….” - Charles Eames
Once we change our perspective about design constraints and start seeing them as a catalyst of creativity and innovation rather than a hindrance, we will be able to harness their potential and start enjoying the otherwise arduous journey of designing a product and bringing it to life.
