What is an initial design brief?
An initial design brief is a document for an industrial design project developed by project design consultants and the client together. Additionally, this document is the point of reference for a project and provides directions to the entire project team.
An initial design brief outlines the scope & deliverables of the project and provides guidance about the timeline and budget. It changes as the project progresses. Typically, the initial design brief sign off is before the start of the project.
The industrial design team works with the client to extract maximum and accurate critical information about the requirements. As a result, it helps the designers come up with the best design to achieve the desired results from the project.
There are various tools like spider diagrams to capture the requirements of the client. Moreover, these tools help project design consultants to convert them into meaningful initial design brief.
This document usually contains the following sections:
- Title page
- Table of contents
- Project statement
- Project description
- Constraints
- Budget
- Timeline
- Needs
- Project goals
- Risks involved
- Sketches or drawings
- Planned Solutions
- Overall Style
- Do Nots
Key Deliverables of the project design consultants
The project design consultants carry out the following tasks:
- Collecting detailed information from the client: functional requirements of various project components, relative priorities, budget, and timescale.
- Another important role of the project design consultants is to expand and complement the information provided by the client. This is done by preparing precise specifications of the project.
- They prepare planning diagrams and spider diagrams. This helps to document all project requirements and the relationship matrix.
- They Collaborate with other consultants including process consultants. The objective is to collect and incorporate specialized industrial design needs.
- Also, preparing and presenting Initial design brief, incorporating all project requirements
- Finally, review the same with the client.
Conclusion
As Chris Anderson says, “ Nail the basics first, detail the details later”. Hence, it is essential to have an initial design brief to finalize the basics at the inception of the project.
