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?

PodLoc is one of the clearest examples we can point to from our work, not because it 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

The brief for PodLoc arrived in about as simple a form as a brief can: a conversation in the Lyttelton Arms, Hagley, where our client sketched out the core idea on the spot — exactly like the archetypal napkin moment people reference but rarely mean literally. The request was straightforward: a self-closing locker door, with a minimal user experience. Our job was 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 PodLoc as a concept had plenty of complexity hiding underneath.

The complexity threatening to water down a simple idea

Underneath ‘a self-closing locker door’ sat a genuinely demanding set of requirements. The door needed to open freely when the locker was vacant, and self-close without needing to be pushed. It needed to lock automatically and reliably with zero user input — no button to press, no step to remember. Unlocking needed to be simple. The whole thing needed to be affordable to manufacture at scale, not just as a one-off prototype. Oh, and it had 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: one modular pod

The concept that resolved this tension was a single, modular pod that functions as one individual locker, but that connects with identical pods to form arrays of any size, from a single stand-alone unit to a full wall of secured storage, all from the same base component.

That single decision did a lot of structural work. It meant the manufacturing and cost problem could be solved once, at the level of a single pod. Scale became a matter of how many pods you specified, not a different product tier or SKU.

Mechanically simple, engineered to be so

The mechanism inside each pod is, 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 is handled by a bi-stable solenoid lock, controlled by integrated electronics that determine whether the pod’s current state should be locked or unlocked, 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 pod will be opened and closed 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

There isn’t another solution quite like PodLoc in the market it was designed for — and our client was the first to bring it there. Not because lockers hadn’t been thought of before, but because the specific combination of modularity, zero-input reliability, and manufacturing economics hadn’t been resolved together in one product.

As modular units, PodLoc’s construction allows straightforward customisation to adapt it to virtually any industrial-grade mobile computer, rather than being dedicated to one specific brand of device.

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? PodLoc changed both. The deployment economics, through modularity, and the user experience, through a mechanism that requires precisely nothing from the person using it.

The full picture, not just the mechanism

What made PodLoc possible as a real, deployable product, not just a clever mechanism, was MAKE carrying the clients idea through every layer beneath it: the system architecture that let individual pods combine into arrays, the engineering behind the locking mechanism itself, 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 it.

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.

PodLoc wasn’t designed to be disruptive. It was designed to properly solve a deceptively simple client 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.

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