Research & Development: Building New Products
Posted: 08.17.09
By Kimball Office Social Media Team

Last week, we talked about product design – generating new ideas, sketching designs. Now let’s see what happens next, after designs are drawn.

Douglas Prickett, Jay Henriott and Keith Metcalf, Industrial Designers, talked to me about building new products – how they create prototypes, earn buy-in, and finalize designs to make the next great office furniture product.

KO: So you’ve sketched your new product design. What now?

JH: Well, after sketches, we do renderings to further refine the concept.

DP: We sometimes hire people that make photorealistic renderings, so that everyone can see what we’ve seen in our heads. Renderings help make our ideas look ‘real.’ We give them our original models, and they create entire rooms around the newly designed product, so that we can see how it will look in actual settings.

This year, we did something different – we used photorealistic renderings to layout the floorplan introducing our new line, Fluent, for our Chicago Showroom Event in June. It was great – no one was surprised at what it looked like when we got there.

JH: The renderings give us a sense of place and aesthetics, but 3-D prints help us refine individual components and structure.

KO: 3-D prints? I’ve never heard of those. How does it work?

KM: They work just like a Read more…