Designing Successful Products with Plastics

Book excerpt: Designing Successful Products with Plastics: Fundamentals of Plastic Part Design provides expert insight into design considerations required to bring a concept product or part through design and ready-for-production. The book shows how integrating four key choices—materials, processes, tooling and design—in every design decision allows the designer to fully vet and optimize the design. Rather than focusing on design rules and engineering equations used during product development, the emphasis of the book is on what the designer needs to consider during the early conceptual visualization stages, and in the detailed stages of the design process. This approach will bridge the gap between the industrial designer, tasked with the 'big picture' product design and use, and the part designer, tasked with the detailed plastic part design for manufacture. Useful to both experienced and novice designers, this book brings valuable design process information through specific examples, enabling designers and engineers in the plastics industry to effectively use the available technical information to successfully design and manufacture new products. - Bridges the gap between the industrial designer working on product design and use, and the part designer working on detailed part design for manufacture - Enables designers to establish a solid foundation for new product development on the 'four pillars' of the process: materials, processes, tooling, and design - Provides a hierarchy and roadmap through creative product design and implementation, so engineers can translate a product from creative concept through to realization and commercialization