product design

Brands touch people through the products and services they sell. Most businesses fail to deliver the brands and products they dream of. Successful brands intercept the market imagination and deliver authentic value. This means that product design is inseparable from business and brand strategy.

1HQ Product works and lives at the interface between form and function: we turn words and ideas into visual form. Multi-disciplinary teams of designers, researchers, strategists and cultural analysts are dedicated to solving seemingly intractable problems, building value, and imagining better futures. We forge designs that impact the bottom line and enhance lives; ours, yours, everyone's.

product design experience

1HQ product design team has the experience of working with an array of major global brands. Team specialities include pharmaceutical, consumer electronics, automotive, luggage, industrial equipment, structural packaging, white goods and small domestic appliances.

semiotics — design by culture

Successful products are more than just elegant styling, they enable users to get more out of their lived experience in a given cultural context. Design by Culture is an approach that taps into emerging culture to identify opportunities for product innovation, resulting in ideas that users will invest in emotionally. Doing so allows our clients to offer breakthrough products without the consumers asking for them. We design user delight, by deciphering culture, we design experiences.

1HQ Product translates cultural needs to product solutions: we turn cultural and social inspiration into visual form.

semiotics — cultural research

In an increasingly chaotic world that demands interaction with various interfaces, product form acts like a text that has to be read by the user and made sense of. If they read the wrong meaning the product fails to make sense. Semiotics is a powerful analytical tool which integrates social and cultural research disciplines such as ethnography, anthropology, psychology, discourse analysis and user-testing to identify all the potential meanings that a product's form can generate. Conversely semiotics identifies signs and symbols in culture that best signify a product's function. Semiotics uncovers meaning in culture, aligns project stakeholders and provides cultural and aesthetic guidelines as creative springboards from which designers can create truly innovative products that make sense to users.

trends and futures research

Innovation requires risk management and trends research ensures that emergent cultural and design trends are spotted early. This ensures that our product designs have a clear innovation proposition and fit into emergent culture.

Our trends and research offer works within the cultural research approach. It is informed and underpinned by social, cultural and design history and thus delineates itself from "cool hunting". Instead, trends and futures research gathers evidence that indicates social, cultural, visual and political trends along the continuum of long-term change in the past. Thus, we are able to segregate fads from tangible cultural trends. This allows clients to project future market opportunities and enables designers to identify products which will create a memorable and lasting impact for both the client as well as user.