DELIVERABLES

Semester 1/2007 RMIT Industrial Design

Elective title: By Product

Lecturers: Simone LeAmon and Liam Fennessy

Contact: nplus1@netspace.net.au and liam.fennessy@ems.rmit.edu.au

Duration and credit points: 13 Weeks / 12 credit points

Room, day and time: room ** 11.C.012 **, Wednesday, 9.30-11.30am

By Product: <>

Participation: each week students are required to bring the following items to class:

· Evidence of research and product development

·

The following deliverables are to be completed in non-contact hours. However, you will be introduced to each task within class, alongside tutorials. Each deliverable will be used in class on the due date. Please be sure to complete tasks on time and bring copies of your texts to class, so the schedule can work effectively.

D.1 Product Idea >>Due: 4 April

Your first task is to develop a product idea that meets the demands of the learning objectives. Your product idea may take the form of a household or outdoor item, personal item, luxury good, service or facility. (We recommend that you stay away from developing jewellery products and consumables). The market potential of your product idea will be assessed rapidly so it is important that you support your ideas with good research and/or evidence of a prospective market.

Once you have a product idea you will need to attend to its design and resolve a satisfactory prototype. If your product idea is a service or facility you will need to visualise it – produce preliminary design drawings and schematics.

Further to developing your design you will need to develop a narrative for your product. This is where your material research and knowledge of its history is critical. To construct an interesting and appealing story for your market you will need to know how to ‘celebrate’ and reveal the unique qualities and features of your product. This narrative will be used to help ‘pitch’ your product idea to the European market.

Your product design and narrative are packaged together to form 8 pages in an A5 presentation book. You will need to design your own layout and submit 8 copies. Please observe the guidelines faithfully so the book can be bound successfully.

Simone will show the By Product book to retailers, distributors and people of note in Milan during Salone del Mobile in April. This exercise hopes to identify opportunities for trade, trade development and media.

The more resolved your product idea is the more seriously it will be received!

D.2 Business Flow Chart >>Due: May 9

Now that you have a product idea, design, a story and Simone in Milan toting your ideas you will need to create a flow chart to turn your idea into a business reality!

A flow chart entails much research and analysis however it can be a liberating and empowering experience to validate your ideas and designs in a commercial context. So you shouldn’t underestimate the role of design in your flow chart – the objective is to find the best possible streams for production, distribution and point of sale. The objective is to find the cleanest, fastest, most economical and reliable streams for all the material and labour inputs in your product. At this point you may start to think twice about your product and adapt your design or production to some new revealed conditions.

Your flow chart is to be a professional ‘working’ document. It will change according to external and internal conditions so, it should be formatted to make editing easy. You will be shown some examples.

D.3 Serial batch production or analysis and feasibility study >> Due: June 4

You can decide to pursue one of two directions for deliverable 3. If you are confident that you can fund and achieve batch production for immediate sale then go for it! Otherwise you can continue on from the flow chart and proceed with a feasibility study. A study such as this is often conducted when large sums of money are required to get the product up and running. For those of you who have developed a service or facility idea this will be a vital contribution to marketing your product to potential financiers and investors. Your study will require some serious business analysis and may require business advice. Part of this study might entail identifying a business mentor or advisor.

D.4 Book Contribution no. 2 >> Due: June 18

You need to re-visit your contribution to the By Product book and produce a new and up-dated version.

You sill need to supply 4 copies.