INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS: don’t let the manufacturer design your product

———​ Every project comes with a list of manufacturing constraints - no undercuts, 3° draft minimum, uniform walls. Most designers take them as physics. But talk to the toolmaker and you’ll find many are just risk boundaries from the last project that went wrong.

The real limits are cost and time, not possibility. That “impossible” undercut? It’s a lifter. That draft angle? Negotiable with EDM or texture. Thin walls? Molded every day in medical.

The best designers don’t just follow the rules, they learn why they were written, just to break them. Because the difference between a safe design and a great one is often just the courage to ask, “Why don’t we try it?”

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