Hi, I'm Phnam.
Hi, I'm Mardis.
And we're the hosts of Future Future, where two designers talk about the future of everything.
We're in the business of turning science fiction into reality for a better future.
And today, we're going to talk about conceptual design.
So, when one thinks of conceptual design,
we'll probably have sci-fi movies going through our heads,
or very sophisticated things about the future.
But in terms of industrial design, conceptual design is where you start.
You start with thinking about ideas of how to use a technology,
or how to use a product, and how to revolutionize an industry.
I feel like it's like the idea of starting with a napkin, right?
Napkin sketch!
We all understand the idea of: we're sitting around,
something pops up in our head, and we get real excited and we sketch it down.
Yeah, and conceptual design can go all the way to
very sophisticated 3D files with color, applications, and all that.
What conceptual design means is that it is an idea that is put in a form
that can be handed off to people to develop it.
And the more precise you are with your conceptual design, the better the results.
To be honest, in conceptual design, that is the best part.
In my opinion, that's where all the magic happens.
And this is great because you can go loose and very wild with your ideas.
And we, in brainstorming conceptual ideas, we try to say, "don't restrict anyone."
"Everything is okay. We're not going to criticize."
"We're just going to share and really develop these wild ideas that would never really make it into reality."
But would they?
It is extremely important to create a safe space for designers and any type of creatives in the room
to put down ideas that they're not ashamed of.
Things that sound completely crazy but might have a small nugget of reality.
And these ideas should always communicate something.
They're communicating an idea, a process, a thought,
and it's all about storytelling:
developing a very loose story that gets more fine-tuned as you get closer to the final product
that's released on the market.
So, put yourself in the shoes of a company that hires designers to come up with conceptual ideas.
They don't want something that's already out there.
They don't want something boring.
They want something that is going to make their dream,
that is going to inspire them to do more and more interesting ideas.
They want ideas that are patentable.
They want ideas that really are at the forefront of their industry.
But when we do this, we don't just, as I said, reach out there wild and go crazy
- a little bit -
but what we do is we frame it with a little bit of usability.
We think about the market.
We think about the opportunity, maybe sales.
We think about the stakeholders: the company, the brand, the people who might be buying it.
There's a lot of different factors that loosely start to get woven into this bigger story.
So everything is about asking questions, surrounding yourself with the right people, and collaborating.
Designers cannot create wonderful ideas that become reality by themselves.
They need other people to turn these into reality.
A typical conceptual design process involves, one, research and definition.
We need to understand in which context we're designing this, who we're designing for,
and what is going to sell.
Phase number two is concepting, is putting down on paper, on a computer,
the different shapes and products and usabilities and prototypes that are going
to help us push the boundaries of how far the conceptual design can go.
And then once we have an idea, we start refining it.
That's when all the details of design language and reality can be integrated in the design
so it can be presented in a way that is realistic.
And then finally, delivery.
We need, as designers, to create files that can be translated to the technical teams, to manufacturers,
in a way that can be comprehensive but also limit the misinterpretations of intent.
And we do a lot of, we'll call them frameworks and tools that we use to define these things,
to define this language. So, CMF would be one of them.
Colors, materials, and finish.
So when we translate ideas of a product,
we can say we define this color with the Pantone matching system or other matching system
that defines its exact color and everyone across the globe knows exactly what it means.
Another way of doing it is PSD, right Phnam?
What's that?
PSD is proportions, surfaces, and details.
So when we think about this design language that represents a brand....
Think about a brand that you like.
What kind of forms, what kind of colors, what kind of finishes,
what kind of surface transitions do they represent product after product?
The more consistent you are in representing a brand,
the more people connect with it and are more willing to buy from it.
We need all these tools like CMF and PSD to communicate our ideas so everybody's on the same page.
And we put these in a umbrella that we call design language.
And when we have a design language that can carry on throughout the process,
everybody's on the same page.
The beautiful thing about a design language - it isn't always limited to, let's say,
your individual product that you're working on at the time.
Oftentimes under an even larger umbrella there is an entire design language for the entire brand.
And this is really, really valuable to make sure all your products are consistent
throughout the life and the family of the brand.
So as you develop a conceptual design, there are are few things to keep in mind.
One, as you're developing the form in a drawing sketch or in CAD,
always print it out and test it.
Testing often will help validate new ideas. Especially ideas that have never been touched before.
That's very important.
Two, never consider anything final.
So, final is what we call in design, "the f word."
We have an engineering partner who actually has this bucket in which we have to drop a dollar every time we use the f word.
No design is final until we cut the tool.
It will be refined again, again, and again
through the process of conceptual design and design for manufacturing until it's done.
I'm pretty good at dropping those f bombs, I'm not gonna lie.
And regardless of what you do, always work to scale.
If you're designing a very very small product or a very very large architecture,
always make sure the human scale is there to tell you, "well, is it too big?" "Is it too small?"
"Is it too bobbly? Is it too rectilinear?"
Everything in life is about proportion,
and design is about inviting people in rather than scaring them away.
That's right. So, when we're concepting new ideas we keep it loose, we refine it.
We really bring a lot of value to the client.
This is what they pay us for.
They pay us to go out and really find out those unique interactions
and unique ways of relating to a product, an idea, a customer in a way that wouldn't
be easily revealed if we went and just took engineering right to manufacturing.
We have to do these very loose kind of wild ideas and opportunity mining along the way.
So thank you for joining us again today on this creative journey.
And we look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye bye.
Bye!