WJEC GCSE Design and Technology

What drives a new product

Products reach the market for one of two broad reasons. Market pull happens when consumers want something that does not yet exist, or want an existing product to be better, and manufacturers respond. The demand comes first and the technology is developed to meet it. People wanting phones that last several days between charges is a pull on battery research, and a pull on the design of lower-power processors.

Technology push works the other way round. A company or research group develops a new material, process or component, and then looks for products that could use it. The technology exists before anyone has asked for it, so the company often has to persuade people that they need the result. Voice-controlled speakers became possible once speech recognition was reliable enough, and the product followed from the capability.

Most successful products involve both. A technology that is pushed with no demand tends to fail, and a demand that cannot be met with the technology available stays unmet until the technology arrives. Designers therefore watch what users complain about and what laboratories have just made possible.

How new technologies affect industry and enterprise

New technology changes how a business makes things and who can make them.

• Automation and robotics take over repetitive, dangerous or very precise tasks, which raises output and consistency and lowers the cost of each item. They also reduce the number of workers needed for those tasks and increase the need for people who can programme, maintain and supervise the machines.
• Digital design and manufacture make it cheap to produce a prototype, so a small business or a single person can test an idea without paying for tooling. Crowdfunding sites and online shops then let that person find customers without a shop or a distributor.
• Data collected from connected products shows manufacturers how their goods are used, which feeds back into the next version.
• Production can be spread across countries, and designs sent as digital files can be made near the customer. This shortens supply chains but makes a business depend on communications and on suppliers it may never meet.
• Old skills and industries decline as new ones appear, so a region can lose work that a new technology moves elsewhere.

Enterprise means starting and running a business to meet a need, and cheaper technology lowers the cost of starting one. It also lets large firms copy a successful small product quickly.

Connected products

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the name for everyday objects that connect to the internet or to each other so that they can send data and be controlled remotely, such as thermostats, doorbells and fitness trackers. Short-range wireless links like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi join them to a phone or a home network. IoT products can learn from use and be updated after sale, and they raise questions about privacy, security and what happens when the maker stops supporting the product.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are programs that find patterns in large amounts of data and improve as they are given more. In product development they analyse user feedback or test results, suggest design options, predict when a part will fail, and adjust manufacturing settings. They depend on the quality of the data they are trained on, so a biased data set gives biased results.

Emerging technology is often described as a driving force in product development because each new capability makes products possible that could not exist before, and companies compete to be first to use it.