Introduction to the PreViz project

(upbeat music) - My name's Jonah Becker. I'm principal of One And Company, which is a San Francisco based industrial design firm. We've been around since 1998 and we work with a very diverse range of industries. From consumer electronics, to sporting goods, to housewares and fashion. - My name is Scott Croyle and I'm the head of design at HTC. HTC, if you don't know, is a smart phone manufacturer. I actually was part of One And Company and I was one of three partners and we started together, I think about seven or eight years ago. But, basically, two years ago we were required by HTC to kind of help them design phones, to kind of move more from an ODM player to an OEM player in the industry. - Yeah, to me preVIS, it's kind of interesting to hear it called that because for us it's part of our everyday process. It's actually what we do and I have often joked that as industrial designers we are living in the future. Because even if it's something that's very tangible and real and a product that will be on shelves in the market someday, that's still something that's 12 months, 18 months into the future. So, our whole process is thinking forward. So preVIS for us is really, you know, it's part of every step in our creative process. For us, obviously, early on in a project, it's about establishing a vision and a vision that everyone agrees to. You know, the design team on our end, the client, and any other stakeholders involved in the project. The, I think the underlying goal is to find that fuel and direction for the design process. So, that means meeting with the client, understanding their business, their history, their goals. It means understanding their market and their competitors, it means looking out at other larger trends in terms of what's happening culturally, what's happening economically and other, you know, world factors that might impact how people might perceive the technology that they're offering, the product they're offering. How people are behaving with products and technology. A design project's a dynamic thing, there are going to be new perspectives, there's going to be points where, you know, maybe the client's going in front of retailers or bringing things to their marketing team. So, for us, the idea of having that strong vision, that strong story about why we're doing something and what we're doing from the start is really important. And I think the most important thing for us is every step in the way, as project deliverables get more and more resolved that that story is always there. That you don't leave the story in the first phase and just assume everyone remembers it. Because obviously there are going to be times when a new party is brought in. And if they don't get that story and they just get this, "Here's what it is, what do you think?" There's potential for disaster. We've basically acquired all the information, what we call the fuel for the design process and we've established some sort of agreed vision that we're then going to explore. So, in the second phase, which is the concept phase, that's where we really go as broad as possible developing solutions to the problem and to address the story that we established in the first phase. And that really ranges. You know, it can be, certainly, lots of sketching, it can be developing more detailed scenarios, it can be creating prototypes for mechanisms. It can be creating simulations for product interactions and how, maybe, hardware interacts with software. But all of these broad range of concept, then, basically during the concept phase, get funneled down. So there's less breadth but more depth to each of the concepts that remain at the end of the phase. The third phase for us is the execution phase. And that's where, up to that point, the concept phase, as I mentioned, starts very broad. You have a wide range of initial solutions that are, you know, discussed and refined and narrowed down. Whether it's one final solution or product that you're designing, or it's a line of products. And that is, at the end of that phase and leading into execution, we want to have complete buy in from everyone involved. That's where the company, the client, has to say, "Okay, we're ready to make this decision to move forward "on this, we're ready to engage with the manufacturing "partner, we're ready to invest the money needed to take "this all the way into production." In the execution phase, that's where we are working with the manufacturing partners, the engineering teams, resolving any little details, issues and just mainly supporting that whole process to make sure that the design intent that was established in the end of the concept phase is maintained throughout the production to the point where a product makes it to the shelves. (upbeat music)