Industrial Product Design and Mechanical Engineering Services
Industrial design and mechanical engineering are our core services.
If you’re looking for a team that can help turn your vision into a beautiful, intuitive, and reliable product, you’ve found the right place. Our product design engineering services offer a one-stop solution for turning ideas into reality. We pride ourselves on being practical designers and holistic engineers who approach products as a team of problem solvers.
Product experimentation is a fundamental part of validating a new product. Testing product performance throughout the development process and prior to launching helps our team avoid backtracking and de-risks quality assurance complications post-launch.
While some brands have full in-house test labs and product testers, many brands and entrepreneurs choose to lean on our product testing services to gather valuable feedback during the development process. Our in-house testing is an integral part of gaining insights and optimizing products.
The best part about partnering with our team to bring your outdoor product to market is that some experimentation is always built-in. Since we’re a team of outdoor enthusiasts, we’re likely users of your product. Get to know our team and take a look at some of our favorite outdoor hobbies. We’re as close as you can get to having your customers design your product.
While there is some overlap between the two fields, designers and engineers typically focus on different parts of the design process. In general, industrial designers make sure people want to pick up and use a product, and engineers make sure that the product works as expected for the user. Our product design engineering services often include a blend of both fields, but the nature of the product typically requires a heavier lift in one field or the other.
Industrial Design
Once a business case is built around an idea, the new product development process starts with industrial design. Industrial Design is the professional practice of converting ideas into physical objects and devices at a commercial scale. First through research, and then into ideation and 3d design, the process determines the general features, the look and feel, and the form of a new product. The product’s use scenarios are studied to understand users’ perspectives and problems, and then the product is created with attention to multiple criteria including usability, ergonomics, and aesthetics, as well as manufacturability, cost and sustainability.
Our team of designers are active members of the local design community and several individuals serve as board members for the Austin chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA).
Mechanical Engineering
Usually after some conceptual design work is complete, product design engineering is done to ensure the feasibility of the designer’s concepts. Feasibility tests may include prototypes, virtual simulations, or calculations to check whether a given design will perform as intended in the real world. Engineers set design constraints that ensure product functionality, then collaborate with designers to refine the product’s design while meeting an established set of performance specifications. Our Trailside team has internal mechanical engineering capabilities, as well as numerous engineering partners that we work closely with to ensure we deliver the best possible designs.
Design-gineering
Yes, it’s a made up word. Design-gineering is a term we use to talk about our process for designing things that work. Unfortunately, industrial design is sometimes thought of as an “aesthetic add-on” at the end of a project to make things look pretty, while engineering can be seen as the only requirement for making a product ready for production. At Trailside, we have a holistic, collaborative design methodology that helps us design with both aesthetics and practicality in mind.
There’s a reason for the old saying, “form follows function”. We always start with practical solution-finding first, then allow the product’s functionality to inform its aesthetics. At Trailside, our designers think about functionality like engineers without losing sight o
Industrial Product Design and Mechanical Engineering with Trailside Creative
Not sure whether you need design or engineering? Odds are, you likely need a little of both. Contact us today to discuss your project and take the first step in the product design process. Whether you need industrial design or mechanical engineering, our product design engineering services have you covered. We’re eager to hear about your vision and help you turn it into a reality.
