We must understand these interactions thoroughly, balancing and prioritising ease of use, for example, against ease of installation, maintenance or disposal.  Separation of ownership and usage often results in harsh treatment of these products.  Despite this, they will be expected to function consistently and reliably, particularly in safety critical situations.

As the user’s expectations from commercial and industrial products and consumer products converge new product solutions and experiences are needed to drive your business growth.

The separation of purchaser, owner and user makes for complex, and often contradictory, requirements and often results in harsh treatment of these products. Added to this there are usually demanding legislative requirements to adhere to. The intelligent use of design presents a unique opportunity to tackle this complexity and develop new product solutions and experiences that will drive business growth.

By analysing user opinions and observed behaviours we can identify the underpinning requirements that drive product specification and selection.  Our multidisciplinary team then translates these insights into new product propositions that can inspire new business thinking.

One crucial element of this is developing and implementing a targeted Visual Brand Language. This approach identifies signature visual characteristics that will communicate your core brand values.  The resulting guidelines allow you to deliver entire product ranges visually aligned with the correct brand messages.

Beyond the visual, Sensory Brand Language defines a product’s haptic and acoustic behaviour, whether through digital interfaces or physical touch points.  Combined with visual brand cues this adds yet more cohesion to the product experience.

Controlling the visual and sensory characteristics of your products will create a more powerful and deeply ingrained brand experience.

This highlights the importance of cost-effective design for all consumable elements, whether this is in the design of replaceable consumables, or the strategy for maintaining product through replaceable modules.

Reducing the production cost of the consumables also provides an opportunity to increase margin, strengthening the commercial business case for tackling product development programmes.

These products are normally used in dangerous, uncomfortable or challenging environments where the user’s stress levels can be high.  Their use must be straightforward and self-explanatory. Their design must demonstrate an inherent fitness for purpose, instilling a sense of confidence in the user.

These requirements help us to highlight the key risks in the project, which in turn determine how we plan and manage the development programme. The resulting project plan will prioritise focused risk mitigation activities early in the programme and will incorporate sufficient time for the regulatory testing and approval of representative manufactured products ahead of the market launch.

Tackling design risks as early as possible in the development cycle improves the probability of a successful development outcome.

The rise of the global product range has increased the ergonomic and cultural challenges that need to be addressed in order to develop long term comfortable products that highly diverse users will want to be seen wearing.

Using system-based task analysis and error evaluation approaches helps us to ensure that all the product interactions are unambiguous and clearly conveyed to the user.

In use rugged equipment will be subjected to high impact and vibration loadings.  Added to this are environmental challenges such as extremes of temperature and humidity – often with large diurnal variations – and the need to seal against water and particulate ingress.

Building and testing rigs early in the development cycle will confirm the capability of the proposed design in each of these areas and help us to manage the development risk.

Through research we can identify known abuse cases and predict others.  Product requirements to tackle this abuse can be identified and included in the specification so that we can design appropriate counter measures.

Unpredictable abuse can be accommodated by ensuring that products are easy to service and straightforward to repair and include error recovery systems.

Products for this arena must be intuitive to use, resistant to misuse, easy to service and straightforward to repair in the field. They must withstand impact and vibration in use and during transportation to theatre.  And they must operate reliably, even when they have been stored dormant for prolonged periods.

At DCA this way of working is a natural consequence of our organisational structure, which encourages our staff to reach out across the traditional inter-departmental barriers.

Gaining a deep understanding and thorough appreciation of the user’s requirements from a product is an essential starting point.  How we exploit and combine new technologies to deliver against these requirements is the key to providing a differentiated product proposition that successfully addresses your target users’ needs and desires.

The electronics and software required to achieve this are tightly packaged into a compact casework whose form was driven primarily by the ergonomic requirements of the reader.  This could only be achieved by designing the casework interactively in parallel with the electronic component placement decisions and the PCB assembly layout.

Creativity and inspirational thinking are the essential starting point.  So we recruit only the best engineers and ensure that every one of them receives formal training in creative thinking techniques. 

Developing and optimising a great concept requires detailed theoretical analysis using mathematical modelling, computer simulation and tolerance analysis tools in combination with the construction and testing of physical rigs and prototypes.

Over forty years’ experience of delivering transportation projects means that we are highly knowledgeable about the strengths and limitations of the processes and materials used in the manufacture and construction of large format products.

Early involvement of identified manufacturing and supply partners will help us to tailor the product architecture and specific design details to exactly match the way that they would like to manufacture, assemble and test your product.  We can also design any necessary production equipment, jigs and fixtures in parallel with the product itself.

Where parts are to be injection moulded, we can apply our comprehensive suite of moulding simulation and analysis tools to support manufacturers and further de-risk the translation of our design intent into production. 

The product may also need to be partitioned into appropriate sub-assemblies that can be assembled, tested and commissioned independently ahead of final product integration.