Controvertially, there are many products which do hardly any of that from one's personal perspective, while to someone else, they meet all those criteria. Right now I am thinking of the 'pet rock' and doubtless, you can cite other examples which from your perspective should never have been conceived.

As you can see, it gets contentious in no time. Debate has raged over what is a product as distinct from a service and what is industrial art for many years. I won't try to definitively explain it all. From my perspective, Product Design and Industrial Art is where an object or service is created to meet the expectations, needs, wants and wishes of an audience. Digging a little deeper, the product exhibits a function which is lent feeling and emotion through form (industrial art). Now ask me what it is tomorrow and this defintion will be slightly different. In a nutshell, it's a difficult phenomenon to pin down as it can encompass so much based on its audience, function, aesthetics, how it interacts with our senses, the era it is part of and of course, the environment.

A much wiser approach is to get out and interact with the products intended audience, to learn all about them, their habits, their likes and dislikes, what enthuses, exhilarates, enlightens them and conversely what thwarts, frustrates or aggravates them. So it's as near as one can to walking through life wearing anothers shoes and seeing the world through their eyes. It's not easy and is often overlooked owing to time and money excuses. As a result, the design process is largely reduced to guess work and personal bias. The end result is often mediocrity - it cannot address the goals and tasks as experienced by the products end users as they were never researched and discovered impartially in the first place. Research is a deep dive into exploration. It often unveils the not so obvious and helps us understand the bigger picture. For example, 'a customer base stated they wanted A but some ethnographic research, might reveal that they need A+B'.

One cannot do design process justice in just a few paragraphs but I'll try to summarize the process from 10,000 feet. It starts with a problem affecting an audience. From this we ascertain who that audience is by developing personas for its sub-populations. This enables us to appreciate who we must design for. Next, we develop use case scenarios for how our personas operate. Research of this kind involves surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and ethnography. Cumulatively, it helps us develop the real world parameters inside which we will operate to tackle the design challenge.

Next, we analyze the competitive landscape to appreciate what is currently on offer and its pros and cons. This helps us realize how we might design and develop a more compelling offering which meets and excceds the pros of the competition and steers clear of their cons.

Gradually we end up with the goals and tasks of the target audience. These are sometimes summarized by an Expectations, Needs, Wants, Wishes model. The design has to address the needs, should cover the wants and with time and budget permitting should try to meet as many of the wishes as possible. In the background however, finer grained analysis of behaviours and motivations as exhibited and practiced by the target audience are considered by the design team.

In parallel with this research is a constant back and forth collaboration with the customer. This involves ideation, wireframing if it's user interface (UI) work, model development or UI mockups, prototypes, design iteration and finally realization.

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