Designing from the Inside Out: Behaviour as the Engine of Product Design

An honest job of design should flow from the inside out, not from the outside in. So said Henry Dreyfuss in 1955. It has never been more true than it is now.

This is a new era of product design: where products aren’t always driven by their mechanics, but can instead display behaviours that we’ve come to expect from our computers. Our devices are more powerful and more complex than ever before. We have a new generation of touchscreen and sensor-driven devices. Objects that were previously stand-alone are being hooked up to the internet and can talk to other objects. Some objects are being dematerialised and/or being made into services. This new era means we need to think about our products differently: to design the device’s behaviour as well as the form and look and feel, to consider the actions the product needs to support, then make the functionality (the inside) as pleasing to use as the device is to look at and touch (the outside).

This session covers:

• Overview of the ways product design is changing.
• New ways of better integrating the different design disciplines.
• Discussion of “Form Follows Function”.
• New process methods for focusing on behaviour.