Thinking About the End User Comes First

Jack Davies is a product design engineer who believes that passion combined with an understanding of how the end user will interact with the product is the key to successful design. Davies says bad design comes from not truly understanding—and only assuming—how people might use a product. Watch the video to learn more about this Amsterdam-based product design engineer.

[Video Transcript]

Jack Davies, Product Design Engineer: For me, it only works if you’re super passionate about what you’re doing—to be able to take an original idea and put your own take on it and do something new.

My name is Jack Davies. I’m from Birmingham in the UK, and I’m 23 years old. I studied in Nottingham in the UK. I was superinterested in the workshop, always down there making things, had a lot of freedom to do your own project as well and something that you are interested in, which I thought was really valuable and really helped.

I get a lot of inspiration from a lot of different things—just looking at random products, you can get inspiration for other projects. I think a lot of bad design comes from not understanding how people interact with that product and not understanding the way that they use it, and you kind of just assume one thing without really testing it.

 I’m superexcited about this new project, designing an injection-molding machine from scratch, like a desktop-grade injection-molding machine. So it’s going to be a lot of aluminum work with aluminum plates that need to be machined.

I don’t really enjoy drawing, which is a traditional way of getting an idea down. So I use [Autodesk Fusion 360] as kind of like a 3D sketchbook. I think it’ll only get easier to produce something yourself—everyone now has more of an understanding of how things are made and that process.

There’s never really been any better time to actually make something. I mean, there’s so many tools available to you now for free to be able to just start doing something, start designing a product, start anything really. You just kind of have to go out there and find the information. It’s all there for you.