PDD, a product design and consultancy firm, is a visionary enterprise with over 40 years of experience. The firm being based in London, UK, and primarily working out of studios in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Boston, operates across 6 continents, dealing with companies that sought out imaginative expertise for both, physical and digital products. With deep industry expertise across several verticals of services, transportation, healthcare, industrial, and consumer-based products, the consultancy exercises their drive to envision, strategize, design, and develop to create what the PDD team calls a ‘Meaningful Innovation’.
Employing a selection of free-thinkers, engineers, and designers, PDD paints a brand-new benchmark in product design with every project they undertake, all to redefine the two pivotal elements guiding a design firm – inventive products and client-driven service.
Below are highlighted 10 of the many iconic products from the project gallery of PDD:
1. Reebok Deck | PDD
The Reebok Deck is a reconfigurable exercise platform which marks the revolutionary upgrade from Reebok Step. Directed by the innovative genius of PSTL and foresight of Reebok, PDD designed the pro deck with a range of features that aligns with a suggested fitness regime, one that has flat, inclined and stepped up configurations that allow different routine pieces of training plus several characteristic features like convenient storage, feet-manipulated adjustments and a rubber surface for better grip; all of it adding to the Deck’s label of an ‘ideal training partner’.
2. Wireless Stethoscope
This product conceived by PDD Future is one that has a whole new take on the traditional stethoscopes with the help of modern technology. Under the influence of multidisciplinary experts, the Radius Wireless Stethoscope developed from popular to the unique by bifurcating the existing product into an earpiece and the transmitter that is to be left on the patient. An innovation such as this enhances concerted medical training and puts the younger patients at ease; a splitting consequence of which is its self-branding as a badge of status within the clinical environment itself.
3. Ford Automotive Interiors
Having Ford choose PDD as a collaborator for guidance in human-centric design developments, the firm prototyped numerous concepts and narrowed down to ‘We Space’ for the Ford Focus and ‘Me Space’ for the Ford Transit. The design revolving around the idea of a cocoon to securely spend the necessary time in, PDD developed the ‘grey buck’- an appropriate design solution after identifying customer insights along the relevant demographics.
4. Levi’s Redwire
With a pair of jeans given as the creative grounds, PDD was proposed by Levi Strauss & Co to re-imagine the design that added to the social landscape of 2007, the year Levi’s Redwire was launched. By incorporating Apple’s iconic iPod into the jeans, the firm designed an apparel fused with a trending piece of technology that was not only highly fashionable for its time, but also newsworthy. Composed of a triad of what would otherwise be merely features, the player’s headphone socket extends into the pocket to conceal the wires and a four-way control ‘nipple’ acts as the iPod’s click wheel which remains attached to the leg of the jeans for convenient access; the main player though sits in a docking cradle which is a removable pocket that is kept in place by a red band, and hence, the apt name.
5. Techspan VMS | PDD
PDD designed a Virtual Message Sign (VMS) for Techspan to be installed on motorways, the kinds that are to withstand fluctuating and harsh climatic conditions, and yet comply with the stringent specifications for proper viewing angles and illumination contrasts. To deliver a novel design, the firm employed optical ray tracings and Finite Element Analysis; the final product installed across the country after modular prototyping.
6. Electric Showers
As the long-term innovation partner of Aqualisa, PDD has harmonised visual appeal and functionality across the manufacturer’s range of showers and helped reduce manufacturing costs. These efforts have raised brand awareness, improved market share and profitability, and satisfied consumers and installation engineers alike.
7. Gyroscopic Bicycle Wheel
For most bicycle riders with balance impairments or conditions affecting coordination, a traditional bicycle is a struggle due to its shortcomings on balance configurations and alignment. So, PDD seized the opportunity to reinvent the wheel by devising one with minimal gyroscopic effect; by using their structural, commercial, and mechanical experience for a viable built architecture, kinematically possible geometry, and energy-efficient drive-train.
8. FastCut Herb Cutter
PDD was tasked by Zyliss to design a kitchen tool for the brand, an herb cutter. By refuting the existing product and redesigning its angle entirely, the creative team modeled an ergonomically efficient “cutting ball” with mechanically engineered circular blades that rotate by 90 degrees for enhanced versatility in palm and grip use. With a prime scope for an effortless reassembly, the FastCut Herb Tool not only manages to curb the negative consumer perceptions but also centralize performance and user safety.
9. Wound Care Device
As one of the many healthcare products designed by PDD, the Wound Care Device was developed for Wound Solutions as a user-friendly, technologically superior, and highly marketable Electrical Muscle Stimulation aid, an eStim Device. The medical contraption meant to be worn to reduce the healing time of lower leg ulcers; it can be worn discreetly under compressive bandages while exercising, which records the patient’s activity and sets appropriate targets for the same. The product was prototyped through major clinical trials and is known to significantly expand the platform of innovation in wound treatment.
10. Belron® Vanbrella | PDD
The Belron® Vanbrella is an instantly deployable, vehicle-mounted canopy for the engineers and technicians of AutoGlass® to use when in the field. Inspired from a Chinese fan, it is a collapsible roof that translates into a compact rectangular box; the vanbrella uses fabrics and fixings engineered particularly for the harshest of conditions and due to incorporation of maximal durability in such an extrusive arrangement, it improves both service and productivity on site.
As mentioned earlier, PDD is an enterprise that seeks to deliver to the client with meaningful innovations, and rightfully so, the presented few products attest to PDD’s integrated principles of user-centric research, engineered design, prototyped simulations and industrial production. Being a product design firm, PDD has gradually heightened and widened its reach in different directions and done justice to both, the celebrated standard it offers and the field of product design itself.
