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My name is Anita Murphy, I am a Director in The Creativity Hub.
We design tools and training to help people develop their creative thinking.
We have two employees in the company.
We are both from a visual communications background so with everything we do we start off with design.
We are very visual thinkers. We explain everything we better in pictures than in words.
Design is at the heart of everything that we do.
Our attitude to design differentiates us from our competitors because we see design as being a holistic process.
It is not just a visual layer that we add on at the end.
Everthing we design we think of in terms of form, the function that it has to achieve, the environment it is going to be used in and the people that are going to be using it.
The form, function, people and the environment are at the heart of our design.
We guage customers reaction prior to the lauch of any of our products by prototyping.
We believe in rapid prototyping and we prototype everything very early on in our idea process.
First of all we design everything on paper. Then we develop it into physical product as early as possible.
We then show it to our customers and guage their reaction. We adapt it based on the feedback we get from them.
The quality of the design of our product is very important to us including the design of the packaging.
We want our products to last. We want our packaging to be durable and not disposable and to be an integral part of the product.
We have found that with the high quality of the product people show it to others. For every customer that buys our product they show it to their friends and we get more customers.
We protect our intellectual property as much as we can. We often can't patent our physical products but we do register our designs.
We also focus on our brand and on bringing out products quickly so we stay ahead of our competition.
The first tip that I would give any entrepreneur is to think about the person they are designing for and the environment in which it will be used.
Those two things alone will answer many questions about the design of your product.
Another tip is to prototype, prototype, prototype. Get your idea into a physical form as soon as possible and get your customers using and interacting with it.
Be prepared to adapt your design by the feedback you get from customers along the way.
You will be surprised and often you will produce a better product based on something your customer has come up with that you hadn't thought of.