Design Disruptive New Products. How?

‘Disruptive’ is one of the most overused words in product development, usually applied retrospectively to anything that sold well. It’s far more useful as a design question than a marketing label: what actually has to be true of a product for it to genuinely change how a category works, rather than just adding another option to it?

Various MAKE projects point to examples of surprising outcomes, not because we set out to be disruptive, but because of how the brief was handled from the very first conversation.

It started with a napkin sketch. Literally

Brief’s can arrive in deceptively simple a forms, such as a conversation in a local pub, where concepts crystallise in sketches out the core idea on the spot, exactly like the archetypal napkin moment people reference but rarely mean literally. The requests are nearly always straightforward: intuitive or self-closing, minimal user experience, easy to assemble, tough and durable but also attractive... Our job, as always, is to make that actually work.

We tend to prefer briefs that start this simply. A loosely defined brief affords real latitude to explore the problem properly, rather than being boxed in by assumptions about the solution before the problem has even been interrogated.

But simple can be deceptive. The simpler the stated brief, the more the real complexity tends to be hiding just underneath it, and our best projects started as simple concepts that had plenty of complexity hiding underneath.

The complexity threatening to water down a simple idea

Underneath ‘a simple design’ typically sits a genuinely demanding set of requirements. The product needs to function freely in one condition, and self-close, lock or secure in another condition. Secure, rugged devices often need to function automatically and reliably with zero user input: no button to press, no step to remember. Usage needs to be simple. The whole thing needs to be affordable to manufacture at scale, not just as a one-off prototype. Oh, and it has to survive daily use in harsh logistics environments.

Any one of those requirements is manageable in isolation. Together, they pull in different directions. Reliability usually wants more mechanical complexity; affordability at scale wants less. Durability wants robust, heavier components; a genuinely minimal user experience wants the whole mechanism to disappear from the user’s attention entirely. This is exactly the point where a lot of products quietly compromise, where the elegant original idea gets watered down, feature by feature, until what ships is... ordinary.

“The gap between a simple brief and a simple product is where most of the real design work, and most of the compromise, happens.”

The idea: modularity

The concepts that resolved this tension are often a result of focussing down to core elements that can function as one individual part, but which can also connect with other components to form arrays of any size, from a single stand-alone unit to a expanded array, all from the same base component.

These single decisions do a lot of structural work. It means the manufacturing and cost problems can be effectively managed, at the level of a single unit. Scale becomes a matter of how many units are specified, not a different product tier or SKU.

Mechanically simple, engineered to be so

The mechanisms for industrial devices inside are needed to be, by design, beautifully simple. A pivoted door uses gravity to return itself to the closed position: no spring, no motor, nothing to wear out or need replacing. Locking and unlocking can be handled by a single bi-stable solenoid, controlled by integrated electronics to determine what the units current state should be, and act on that instantly and without any direct input from the user.

That apparent simplicity is the engineering achievement, not the absence of one. A gravity-return door and a bistable solenoid sound almost obvious described in a sentence. Getting the geometry, weighting, and control logic right so that the mechanism works reliably, every time, without user input, in an environment where the unit will be used multiple times a day. That’s where the real complexity of the brief actually got resolved, quietly, behind a mechanism simple enough that nobody using it ever has to think about how it works.

What makes this disruptive, not just new

Some of the solutions we have designed for our clients are unique to the market they were designed for, and our clients have been the first to bring it there. Not because the sector was completely new, but because the specific combination of modularity, zero-input reliability, and manufacturing economics hadn’t been resolved together in one product.

Modular units allow for straightforward customisation, adapting to virtually any industrial-grade mobile computer, rather than being dedicated to one specific brand of device. Agnostic design from the outset requires insightful planning from the beginning.

That’s the real test for whether a product is disruptive rather than simply new: does it change the economics or the experience of the category it enters, or does it just add another variant to an existing shelf of options? Our designs change both. The deployment economics, through modularity, and the user experience, through to a mechanism that requires precisely nothing from the person using it.

The full picture…

MAKE carries our clients idea through every layer beneath it: the system architecture, the engineering behind the concept, procurement and supply chain for the components involved, and the full picture down to the branding, logo, and even the instruction manual that ships with the final product.

That end-to-end ownership is, in our experience, what separates a genuinely disruptive product from a good idea that never quite makes it to market. A brilliant mechanism with no thought given to how it’s manufactured, sourced, or explained to the person unboxing it rarely survives contact with the real world. Turnkey delivery is how a client’s idea sketched in a pub actually becomes a product that drives business growth.

Our work isn’t designed to be disruptive. It is designed to properly solve a deceptively simple brief, without letting the underlying complexity water the idea down. The disruption was the result, not the goal, but an ambitious client idea is at the heart if any disruptive NPD.

MAKE takes projects from first concept through to system architecture, engineering, supply chain and branding, turnkey, start to finish.

Get in touch to discuss your project.