The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

by Hardi Meybaum

Embrace Open Engineering and accelerate the design and manufacturing processes Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group of internal "experts" for new ideas. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design explains the rise of "Open Engineering," a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. Open Engineering is crowdsourcing, it's collaborating, it's sharing and connecting. And it's helping a growing number of companies create better products faster than they ever imagined. The Art of Product Design shows you how to harness its power for your company.

Genres: Design

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 9, 2013

Reviews

[Geoffrey Fredrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about sixty percent an ad for GrabCAD, but it's not devoid of interesting information.

What it is not about, basically at all, is the art of product design. It instead concerns the changes the author expects to see in the design field as a result of cloud-based tools. It might benefit from a title that in any way describes its contents.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read - but overwhelmingly focused on CAD design. Based on the title, I was hoping for broader coverage overall on how open hardware, makerspaces and home 3d printing are changing the world of Product Design.

[Daniel Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. Great for anyone interested in CAD

[Abby Epplett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A long advertisement for GrabCAD.

[Sri Krishna · Rating 2 out of 5]

More Ad less book.

[Swamy Atul · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is about CAD. Not about Product Management or Design as I thought.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though this book was not what I expected when I bought it, I found the story to be compelling and insightful enough to like the text at the end of the reading. “Product Design” is part-business origin/founder-biography story, part tech-journalism/industry-profile, and part general ‘business-strategy’/philosophy on product design (though to be-clear not directly applicable to the process of product design itself). The text recounts the story of Hardi Meybaum’s rags-to-riches(? - rumors put his company, GrabCADs exit somewhere just-south of 100 million USD) story from a wide-eyed newly ‘liberated’ Estonian youth, a country just emerging from it’s Cold War era connections with the USSR, ‘toiling’ in the ‘sweatshop’ of Tech in the late-90s/early-2000s, to his risky trip to the US looking to connect with current engineering luminaries focused on CAD software, in hopes of developing a ‘social-network’ platform to share CAD engineering artifacts, and the start of his success after getting a long-shot audience with the CEO of AutoCAD.

This idea would eventually form into “GrabCAD”, which from it’s description in the book, is a kind of a mix between Github and Kaggle for CAD development and it’s developers. Meybaum not only wanted his platform to showcase little-known talent in the engineering community, but also “democratize” the development of CAD artifacts which often came with a high barrier-to-entry via the cost of individual/site software-licenses that had to be purchased from one of the established CAD oligopolists. The book goes into good detail on the state of the software industry for this class of product, as well as how the software developed historically from the scientific computing revolution of the late 60s, and how those tools are integrated in ordinary engineering work-flows.

In this sense, the title of the book is literally about the process of product design, though contrary to most of the books with this (or similar-sounding) titles, this is about actual material products (and not the more popular software-driven products most tech/consumers are currently enamoured with today). If this is what you are looking to get out of the book, you should look elsewhere. However, as a general business case-study of how social/multi-sided platforms can turn apparently mundane or profitless sounding ideas (an open source CAD tool say), into winning ventures (defined here as a major 8-9 digit exit for the founders), this is a decent book. It’s also one of the rare-cases I’m aware of where a tool that was initially convened as a b2b / industrial scale tool was successfully transformed into something closer to a consumer-like appellate (though here ‘consumer’ I mean where the market-platform supported by GrabCAD may not necessarily be exclusively engineering-artifacts from one major corporation like GE to another, say Lockhead, but maybe an contracting engineer to a small business consumer). Overall, this was an enjoyable read, though little light on the technical/conceptual insights. Recommended.

[Chuma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book talks about open engineering and the emergence of 3D CAD tools in a way that will revolutionise the design, manufacturing and marketing industries.

Citing examples of companies already using this model, such as GrabCAD.com of which the writer is CEO, Hardi expresses confidence in the changing variables of the engineering design profession.

The book is a good read for any mechanical engineer or designer or intending entrepreneur.

[Christopher Struck · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too much promotion and history of the author's own start up and not enough material pertaining to the title itself.