It’s well known that at Katapult we champion design led solutions, that’s a given. What’s less understood is that design is not just about CMF and aesthetics. Good design must be underpinned with great engineering.

When clients are starting their product journey we work hard to understand the core problem they’re trying to solve and to define the technology they have (or need). We view the problem through the user’s lens with as much objectivity as possible. Imagine the idea of tearing the project down first before we build it up with great foundations.

We build every project on an chassis of creative engineering. Clever thinking that solves technical challenges in new ways with smart materials, mechanisms, manufacturing techniques and sheer hard work.

It’s always exciting to see mixed design and development teams wrestling with a problem, bouncing back and forth with crazy ideas until sometime leaps out. That moment of revelation remains our North star, but it’s just the beginning of the journey to get a product to market.

A favourite project of ours that illustrates this perfectly is the Micro-X Miniaturised Baggage Scanner. When working on this project our breakthrough was flipping the scanning approach from moving luggage past an x-ray device to spinning the luggage on it’s axis like a ‘Lazy Susan’ turntable. This clever insight saved space, reduced complexity and created a paradigm shift in product cost. It was a clear light bulb moment!

At this point our engineering team jumped in to make the idea reality. Starting with crude physical mockups, basic CAD layouts and a rough idea of internal components the team built up a range of test rig style prototypes. Each generation of prototype featured increased functionality and detail. More fidelity gave our team more insights to improve and refine the product.

As the design matured their role shifted to focus more on Design For Manufacture (DFM) to ensure that the creative vision was an optimised, manufacturable solution that delivered on the earlier promise. During the entire process we worked seamlessly with Micro-X’s technical teams, adjusting to their input, managing outcomes and directing design outputs.

Seeing our engineering team stretch across a project from research and ideation, through creative problem solving to detailed DFM builds client confidence in outcomes and speeds the path to market. This considered application of creative thinking and rigorous process is essential for creative studios like ours to deliver globally impactful outcomes for our clients.