Design+Opportunities

=Identifying Design Opportunities=

If you are to become an effective, independent practitioner in design and technology, you will need to develop a flexible framework of skills, knowledge and understanding in the sub-skills of designing, that you can call upon, when needed. Identifying real design opportunites is probably one of the hardest to achieve.

During your early studies, you will have been working to design briefs and specifications drawn up by someone else, most probably your teacher. As your studies have progressed you should have been given the opportunity to develop your own design briefs, to establish relevant design criteria and to convert these into clear specifications independently. This is no easy task – these are high level thinking skills which need plenty of practice!

Here are a few thoughts from some people who've been there...! //“the problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. ”// **Dee Hock - ‘The Circle of Innovation’** //“you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the Prince but, one Prince can pay for an awful lot of frogs!”// **Art Fry - Inventor of the Post-It note** //"invention is 1 % inspiration .....and 99% perspiration....!"// **Thomas Edison**


 * Identifying design opportunities is clearly not an easy task, so where do they emerge in the wider world?**



As you can see, only about 10% are genuinely new innovative products that never existed before. Most are based on the idea of 'continuous improvement' - that is, creating new products that are an improvement on what went before, in terms of cost, performance, appearance, manufactuarability etc'

=Design opportunities can emerge from a number of starting points.=

The term Market Pull is used to describe the approach where a market opportunity is observed and an appropriate product is developed to meet the user need.

The term Technology Push is used to describe the situation where new technological knowledge is put to innovative use(s) in the development of products.

The term Platform Product describes the approach when a new product is built around an existing sub-system.

Designers use a number of strategies to help them think up new or improved project ideas. These include product analysis and the use of lateral thinking techniques such as brainstorming and bisociation.

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