MUPIC COURSE

Water Rescue Project – part of the presentation. Industrial design: Václav Svítil, Jan Vítek

The definition phase aims at organizing the gathered information and defining the key properties of the designed product. At this phase, we try to describe the proposed products as best we can.  

We try to describe it from a functional point of view, in terms of price, availability, manipulation, performance, materials, etc.

We can use "fixed data" to describe the product, such as the maximum possible price, weight, product size and other technical or legal restrictions. Knowledge of physics laws will often be helpful. 

Another way of obtaining as much information about the product as possible is creating a probable path - describing individual phases of the product life cycle. It can be captured as a movie script or a film strip. We try to imagine what features the product should possess in different situations and formulate those in the final specification. 

At this stage, to specify the idea we are working on, it is useful to write a description of the product in a few sentences and describe our goal: how the product should work and what it will be used for. These sentences will serve us as a focal point.

Example: We are looking for a floating device in which a child could be evacuated. 

It should be stable on the water, protect the child, contain basic supplies for the child for 24 hours away from home. The device should be stackable, made of available materials so that it can be cheap. When folded, it should be as small as possible. 

The manipulation must be intuitive and simple, it must be easily handled by a person exposed to a stressful situation. This is a basic description of our design.

Water Rescue Project – part of the presentation. Industrial design: Václav Svítil, Jan Vítek