Karten Design provides product innovation for leading companies by connecting creativity to commerce. For 28 years, we have been creating emotional bonds between consumers and products, helping our clients to build brands and generate revenue. Our collaborative approach to innovation integrates design strategy and research, industrial design and mechanical engineering disciplines through every phase of the product development process in order to maintain a continuous focus on the end user’s needs and desires.
What we do
Design Strategy and Research
Our deep, user-focused investigations yield actionable insights that help our creative team to identify and meet real customer needs.
We believe that meaningful differentiation comes from a personal connection with customers and a deep understanding of the broader social, cultural and business context in which a product competes. Through design strategy and research, we re-frame problems and approach them from many different angles, looking for opportunities to set our clients’ products apart in highly competitive markets.
Our researchers immerse themselves in individual motives, behaviors, values and ceremonies. Using a variety of tools, visualization methods and analysis processes, we transform this data into actionable insights for internal and external product development teams that direct our clients to connect with their target market and capitalize on new business opportunities.
Methods and Techniques Include:
- Contextual Inquiry
- Ethnography
- Interviews
- Design Clinics
- Perceptual Studies
- Work Flow Analysis
- Usability Research
Industrial Design
We transform opportunities into innovative, producible solutions.
We tackle our design projects with empathy, in-depth knowledge and open minds. Armed with research insights into our client’s brand, marketplace, customer and user, our creative team translates this understanding into product innovation.
We design from the user’s perspective and advocate for the consumer to ensure that our designs are easy, intuitive and comfortable to use, providing satisfying experiences for each of the people a product touches over its lifecycle.
We deliver product concepts that increase value through functional innovation and create desire through aesthetic innovation.
Methods and Techniques Include:
- Ideation
- Form Development
- Brand Integration
- Human Factors
- Ergonomic Analysis
- Graphic User Interface
- User Advocacy
- Information Architecture
- Color & Material Studies
Mechanical Engineering
Working in close collaboration with a client’s in-house team and our own designers, we ensure that a product concept can be translated efficiently into an effective product.
Our creativity is grounded in the real-world constraints of manufacturability. Karten Design’s extensive experience navigating regulatory requirements, our understanding of materials and production processes and our prototyping and production documentation capabilities ensure that our concepts can effectively be brought to market.
Methods and Techniques Include:
- Solid Modeling (ProE/Solidworks)
- Materials Analysis And Selection
- Regulatory Compliance
- Dfm (Design For Manufacturing)
- Prototyping
- Production Documentation
- Manufacturing Support