203: Design for Manufacturing for a New Invention Product

24-11-2023 • 20 mins

Paul Davis is a senior industrial designer at our very own Mako Design for almost 10 years. He achieved Honors status in his degree in Product Design Engineering and Industrial Design at Edinburgh University. Today Paul will share valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on the difference between basic CAD and design for manufacturing, why design for manufacturing is so important early in the design process, and best practices for designing a product for manufacturing success.

Here are the key takeaways from the episode:

Designing products for manufacturing.
Cost-effective, good-looking, and high-quality is best!
Concept design needs to take into account planning, parts, and logic for how the product will eventually be manufactured.
Simplicity in design leads to quality manufacturing.
Using manufacturing CAD software to build original CAD models heavily improves the process and reduces cost in both prototyping and manufacturing.
Considering how you manufacture your product while building your first full CAD design is integral.
There are many manufacturing methods that go into developing a new hardware product.
Manufacturing draft angles, tool design, part integration, OEM parts, materials data sets, etc.
Industrial design and conceptual mechanical engineering are interconnected.
Simple products succeed more often than complex products for new hardware startups developing a new invention idea for the first time for manufacturing.