This might seem like the mantra of an elite athlete, but is pretty much the process we all go through on a daily basis. Often the results are the only thing that people see, but the learning and the failing is part of the reason that we get the results. In the design industry we are all very much judged on the final result, but there are so many factors that dictate how a project turns out - the budget, the relationship with the client, time constraints to name but a few.
So you would think that designing a product with none of those constraints would be easy, right…?
A few years ago we had a “wouldn’t it be nice if…” moment over lunch which lead us to create Pelotoy. A Scandinavian style wooden toy inspired by the colours and theatre of the Tour de France. What started out as a simple idea, very quickly turned into a very steep learning curve. We became experts in how natural materials react to heat and moisture, how big individual pieces need to be to avoid choke hazards, not to mention low friction bearings and the pull strength of magnets! All of which to the end user will seem obvious, but it really is so far from that. We created countless prototypes, some of which we look back at now and wonder what an earth we were thinking!