Struggling to balance creativity and practicality in industrial design?

By setting clear, well-defined goals, you create a roadmap for the design process that aligns with both user needs and business objectives, ensuring a more successful and impactful product.

At times these goals can get clearer via market engagement and or interaction with entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. In other words, the goal can go through a realistic refining process via these external perspectives as sources of practical experience, giving clear goals that are strongly aligned with opportunities or market gaps.

In developing a green product for instance, embracing a material that was initially perceived as poor quality wood added to dimensions of narrative and inspired further innovation in a recent iteration that I carried out. Asking the right questions when faced with such limitations can inspire innovative breakthroughs.

Constraints in industrial design are not just barriers to be overcome—they are opportunities to innovate within defined boundaries. By embracing these limitations, designers can unlock new levels of creativity, resulting in solutions that are not only inventive but also viable in the real world. Constraints force designers to think differently, leading to breakthroughs that might never have occurred in a constraint-free environment.

A project without set constraints can be as scary as a blank canvas. The constraints provide borders for you to explore within. I like to begin a project with clearly outlining the constraints that exist, all the stakeholders that are affected by the design and all the hopes and fears about the project. Define what success would look like and what failure would look like. Use a software like miro to document everything with your team and revisit it often. Perhaps do an inverse brainstorm and consider all the bad solutions that you can come up with. This can free up creativity and might lead to breakthroughs of ideas!

One of the most effective ways to balance creativity and practicality is to put the user at the center of the design process. During the development of one product, we conducted extensive user research to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. This feedback informed our design choices, ensuring that the final product was not only aesthetically pleasing but also practical and intuitive for users.

When designers focus on the end-user, the balance between creativity and practicality becomes almost second nature. This approach ensures that innovative ideas are always grounded in reality, enhancing the user experience rather than complicating it. The result is products that are not only creative and visually appealing but also functional, intuitive, and deeply resonant with the target audience. By keeping the user at the center of the design process, designers can create solutions that are both imaginative and effective, leading to greater user satisfaction and long-term success.

Industrial design is rarely a linear process. I've found that embracing an iterative approach allows for a dynamic interplay between creativity and practicality. We start with broad concepts, then refine and test them against real world constraints. This iterative cycle allows us to explore creative possibilities while ensuring that the final design is feasible and functional.

I is also important during this process to have mindful brainstorming without any judgement or having too much of critical thinking approach. It is also important to always use visualizations and imagination to your advantage (e.g. the product will be used in real-life scenarios.). Always get inspired from different industries, nature, new technologies, trends, previous attempts, etc.

Embracing sustainable approaches is also closely linked to local contexts such as cultural values, available materials, the environment, local policies, local production chains and available markets. Incorporating these in the design or creative process helps to root the innovation in reality as well as create a genuine a solution that is likely to thrive in service and that has increased chances of being sustained.