Emerging from the clouds

摘要

So you've got an idea for a product. You might have gone so far as to turn your idea into a design; you might even have gone into your shed or local maker-space and transformed your idea into a prototype. But how do you turn that prototype into a product? And how do you develop a manufacturing process so that the single working widget that embodies your design evolves into a series of identical units, made for a defined cost, that customers can go out and buy and generate a profit to reward your efforts? It's an arduous process that involves the input of many people and lots of compromises on the way. Some designers feel that the final product is quite far removed from their original vision; and the compromises that have to be made to lock the design mean that the final product might not be precisely what all the customers want or need; it's close enough but some of them might have ideally preferred something slightly different.