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Product Design
Industrial Design Mechanical Design |
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(+64) 021 106 9526
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SAGE designs products
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SAGE gives you a complete design solution.
Many companies can provide product design, industrial design and mechanical design services. But that's generally only half the job, and often the easy half. Not so many design companies have the engineering background and decades of real-life production experience that allows SAGE to holistically design and integrate ALL aspects of the design, resulting in the lowest cost, most manufacturable, most reliable product possible. This includes the less glamorous but absolutely vital aspects of design such as...
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SAGE designs for all manufacturing processes.
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SAGE works with many manufacturing processes to meet the
specific needs of your application and your budget, including...
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SAGE's secret weapon - the "inside-out" design philosophy
The terms “Industrial Design” and “Mechanical Design” are often used interchangeably with "product design". Nothing could be further from the truth. Important as they may be, at SAGE we regard them as being a very small part of the overall product design process. In our experience “Industrial Designers” often have a “surface” design philosophy in which aesthetics are the primary consideration. These concepts are then thrown over a wall to the mechanical designer who has to figure out how to make it all work. By contrast SAGE has a holistic "inside out" design philosophy that starts with defining and weighting the core commercial requirements, such as product cost, manufacturability, available technologies, reliability, usability, serviceability, ease of installation, time to market and budget. Once these functional and commercial imperatives have been resolved we work outwards to the aesthetic shell, resulting in a product that not only looks fantastic but achieves its commercial objectives.
SAGE designs heat-sinks and optimises thermal management.
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Industrial hi-tech electro-mechanical products that are required to distribute and control high currents present special challenges. High current implies not only localized hot spots in the power dissipating components themselves, potentially causing early catastrophic failure with side-effects such as fire, but also creates an elevated ambient temperature within the product that shortens the life of every component. Management of these temperatures to safe levels is absolutely critical to the reliability of your product. Part of my design role is to manage the thermal issues in your product, whether that be minimizing heat generation in the first place, or optimising its dispersal to somewhere it can’t do any harm, and do it in a way that is totally integrated into the overall design, ensuring the lowest cost, smallest and most reliable design without compromising the product’s aesthetic goals.
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Example of a high-pressure die-cast case half that incorporates a heatsink for dissipating heat generated by FETs and many other components
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SAGE designs connectors and electrical contacts.
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Connector selection is one of the most critical areas in hi-tech product design, particularly for products that must handle high currents. Not only are connectors a major potential source of unreliability but they also make up a good proportion of product cost, both directly for the parts themselves and indirectly in the compromises that have to be made to integrate them into the mechanical package. Connectors are frequently the limitation in product miniaturization and often force a compromise in the shape and look of a product. We can identify a short list of off-the-shelf connectors and do any testing that may be required for validation. Alternatively, if you want the world’s smallest connector with 3 power contacts, 13 digital contacts, an integrated green LED, built-in connector labeling, coloured pink and styled to integrate perfectly with the aesthetic design of your product, we can manage the design of a custom connector system and organize its manufacture at low cost in Asia.
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SAGE designs User interfaces (both physical and GUI).
User Interface, UI, User Experience, UX, Human Interface, HI. Ergonomics. Call it what you will, the business of interfacing the end-user with your product is probably the greatest factor in determining its success in the marketplace.
Ironically, although "User Interface" is now recognised as a specialist area, it is surprising how little positive effect this has had on product design, in fact, quite the opposite, the current quality of UI design is at an all-time low. Whereas once the holy grail of UI design was intuitive use we are now surrounded by products in which the UI is based on aesthetics and gratifying the personal ego of the designer rather than on optimising ease and intuitiveness of use for the user. We are now surrounded by physical user interfaces that you are lucky to be able to find let alone use, labels that look like buttons, buttons that look like labels, switches and buttons that require motor skills and targeting beyond the capabilities of many of the intended users, Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) covered with arcane icons that are in the wrong place and too small to target, hidden roll-over options, meaningless and inconsistent labels, poor contrast lettering...the list goes on and on. SAGE's approach to UI is to design for a product's users, not for ourselves, to create UIs that will not require you to consult Youtube to unravel its mysteries, and which still looks stunning.
Ironically, although "User Interface" is now recognised as a specialist area, it is surprising how little positive effect this has had on product design, in fact, quite the opposite, the current quality of UI design is at an all-time low. Whereas once the holy grail of UI design was intuitive use we are now surrounded by products in which the UI is based on aesthetics and gratifying the personal ego of the designer rather than on optimising ease and intuitiveness of use for the user. We are now surrounded by physical user interfaces that you are lucky to be able to find let alone use, labels that look like buttons, buttons that look like labels, switches and buttons that require motor skills and targeting beyond the capabilities of many of the intended users, Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) covered with arcane icons that are in the wrong place and too small to target, hidden roll-over options, meaningless and inconsistent labels, poor contrast lettering...the list goes on and on. SAGE's approach to UI is to design for a product's users, not for ourselves, to create UIs that will not require you to consult Youtube to unravel its mysteries, and which still looks stunning.
Here are some UI areas SAGE can help with...
- UI Specification to define what is required to be controlled or adjusted, when, to what extent and by who.
- Selection of appropriate I/O technology (touch screen, soft keys, silicone keypads, mylar keypads, individual keys, etc)
- Selection of appropriate physical user interface devices (switches, buttons, soft keys, etc).
- Selection of appropriate actuators for these devices (push, toggle, rocker, slide, momentary, latched, etc).
- Selection of appropriate and consistent terminology for the UI devices.
- Design of sensible and intuitive control layouts and appropriate use of colors and contrasts for readability.
- Design of GUIs for intuitive usability and clarity
- Writing Help messages that are actually understandable to the user.
- Design of UIs for users with limited motor skills and/or cognitive skills.
- Simplification/Minimization of UIs to provide maximum functionality with minimum user I/O.
- Selection of sensible default values and adjustability ranges.
- Selection of the most appropriate control sequences and control options.
- Design of Menu Tree structures
- Design of structures to support different access levels