Product Design a Valuable lesson #2

Anyone who thinks you are only as good as your last design project is misguided – I hear this said all the time, but the fact is, you are only as good as your next product design, because you hopefully take forward all the things you have learnt from your last.  Whilst it is important to make the lastest completed project as good as possible as this will be the most recent thing you can be judged on, I also think it is very important to be able to make mistakes and show how you have progressed. Having had quite a few product design projects in my past where the outcome, on reflection, has not been as strong as I would have liked, I now know not to be dishartened, just to analyze where to improve and come back stronger

Product design A most valuable lesson

I never know when a design is right, or when it’s finished, but I have developed a good sense of when it’s wrong and I just keep going, making it less wrong each time, until it’s as less wrong as it can be.  This doesn’t mean to say that it is, or will ever be totally right.  A design can always be improved, but you have to know when to stop.  The only way I have found to do this is to go too far and then take a few steps back.  Someone once made me take a project I thought I’d finished and redo it. Then they made me redo it again.  At that point I began to hate that person, but I have to admit, that what I learnt was that the first time I hadn’t pushed the project far enough and I came up with a much cleaner (elegant) way of solving the problem the second time around.  Trying to do it for a third time taught me I couldn’t improve on the last, as adding more wouldn’t have made it perform or look any better and taking anything away would have made it perform and look less, so I knew I’d gone far enough.  This is probably the most important lesson I was given, you have to push and push to get something right and you have to go too far to realise when you’ve gone far enough.