15 April 2014
“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”
Joshua J. Marine
Claire Banks, the business development manager at award winning product designers GX Design Engineers, part of the GX Group, discusses the range of choices customers are faced with when growing an idea from inception to commercial reality.
“The product design lifecycle has several key development stages all of which throw up a host of choices, each with its own cost implications,” advises Claire. “The role of a design agency like GX Design Engineers to is to guide you through those choices from advising on the choice of key materials through to how best to prototype the product, before finally agreeing the manufacturing process.”
To illustrate this point Claire discusses the process GX Design Engineers went through when developing a scientific instrument to replicate the physical properties of the human stomach – the Dynamic Gastric Model (DGM).
Material selection
The main consideration when choosing materials to use in product development is to minimise the cost whilst meeting product specifications. In the case of the DGM having to replicate how a human stomach digested meant using materials which would not be corroded by all the chemicals needed to simulate stomach acids. Working alongside the client, the team at GX Design Engineers chose a flexible polyurethane material that was acid resistant and which also closely resembled the physical properties of the human stomach. Using such a flexible material additionally helped with keeping manufacturing costs low since inexpensive silicon moulds could be used to build this section.
Manufacturing
Appreciating how the product will be used or marketed frequently influences which manufacturing process the design team considers. Some clients want their product mass produced; in which case GX Design Engineers ensure the design can be economically manufactured. Whilst other clients need a more bespoke product, this is frequently the case for the medical and scientific clients that GX Design Engineers work with.
“In the case of the DGM the client only wanted a low volume made so did not need to explore the costs for mass production.” Claire recalls. “This greatly affected our choice of manufacturing processes and we had to seek companies that were capable of machining the specialist materials required. We also needed to be mindful that ultimately this particular product would be used to assess absorption rates for drugs and for food research, so whilst we were not bound by medical standards, we felt it was important to work with medically approved grades of materials.”