Insight-driven design - a key to innovation success

We’re in an age where brands can’t escape the close scrutiny of customers and consumer watchdogs. One bad product experience can degrade a brand’s reputation.
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This is impacting the way products are designed and marketed, with greater attention paid to the customer experience and the physiology of buyers and users and how they react to products - all to be considered before starting the product development process.

With fast one-off product prototypying widely available, more manufacturers are valuing the product designers experience, especially their insights on assessing product-market fit, research and manufacturing knowledge. Creating new products is complicated:  Insight-driven designers increase the level of innovation while lowering risk, making new product development a far more rewarding process for individual manufacturers.

The wave of new connected digital and IOT products presents new challenges for manufacturers, which is in turn changing the way that product development projects are run. There is also a heightenedawareness about the impact that products have on the environment and society, and that awareness continues throughout the product development and manufacturing process.Industrial design firm Blender works with companies to help them tackle these new challenges, and reframeing their thinking about the problems that they believe they are solving.

Blender has invested in their own methodologies to help clients think more insightfully and holistically as they explore new types of products and user experiences. With a strong design-for-manufacture ability Blender specialises in the development of electronic products, working closely with electronics engineers and multi disciplinary teams.

“We are seeing fantastic results from our approach, after all the first and most important step towards creating a commercially successful product is defining the right thing to make!” says CEO Ollie McDermott. “We're always focused on the problems that products solve, who the key stakeholders are and what the goals are for our clients. We’ve developed a successful formula and turned this into a service – we believe the first of it’s kind. It works, and it’s something our team is really proud of.”

Blender has won numerous international and NZ design awards for the products they have developed. One example is an R&D grant for a project developing a new shock mitigating boat seat ‘Jolt Rider’ (Below) which recently won a Bronze at the Best Awards.   For further information www.blender.nz

​If your business is based in Auckland North, invests in R&D and has a growing customer base, your business could be featured here. Contact Kel Marsh, kel@grownorth.co.nz.  For other inspired Kiwi stories see www.inspiredkiwi.co.nz