Capabilities
Speck Design is a team that delivers product strategy and design from concept to market.
We employ Renaissance Thinking with deep expertise in user insights, communication design, experience design, industrial design, and engineering but are also cross-trained in these disciplines so that we can better bring our experience to bear on each project.
Design and Innovation
The Design and Innovation Department at Speck Design is a multidisciplinary group that works in a highly collaborative fashion to generate outstanding results for our customers. The group combines user insights with our industrial design (ID), communication design, and experience design expertise. We deliver forward-thinking design, approaching each project with passion and providing informed, tangible solutions that reflect our client’s corporate needs and brand attributes.
A core component of Design and Innovation, Speck’s in-house User Insights group has over 20 years of design research experience across a breadth of industries and methodologies including ethnography, competitive survey and analysis, focus group testing and design validation testing. User Insights infuses the Innovation and Design process through every phase with a deeper understanding of user motivations, needs, product expectations and experiences. Another important aspect of the group is understanding and working with user behaviors - often called experience design. During this process, the group performs workflow analysis, produces wireframes, and generates storyboards that can inform design direction.
The second key element of the Design and Innovation group is industrial design (ID), which is often described as the bridge between user insights and engineering. Working collaboratively, the ID team uses conceptual models to express their ideas that take the form of sketches, renderings, breadboard models, physical models prototypes (both full and partial scale), appearance or show models, and CAD surface models. An important component of ID is aesthetic design which involves bringing personality and form to the products being developed. With the goal of creating a compelling product image that represents a brand and connects with end users, designs are generated by building stories around research findings and through careful analysis of market and design trends. The tools we use to define our aesthetic design are; surface design, color, material and finish specifications, and design guidelines.
The final component of the Innovation and Design group is communication design which includes GUI design, logo design, branding, product packaging, instruction manuals, product graphics, badges, and nameplates.
Mechanical Engineering
Speck Design delivers engineering services to the automotive, consumer, cleantech, datacom, industrial, medical and robotics sectors. This diversified structure allows each group to cultivate the relationships, expertise and resources to meet the specific needs of clients in their specific industry, while sharing resources, experience, and a common commitment to technical excellence. Our seasoned engineering staff is accomplished across the full product development spectrum, from ideation and innovation, through user insights and product development, to analysis, product testing, and volume manufacturing. The tight integration of Speck Design’s engineering, research, and industrial design services provides clients with a seamless route from strategic need to product revenue. While it is always exciting to solve a technical challenge, or deliver a difficult solution on a tight schedule, our most satisfying moments derive from the close and collaborative relationships we build with our clients. These partnerships support not only the necessary exchange of technical information, but facilitate a shared inquiry that fuses Speck Design’s process, resources, and skills to our clients’ needs in a mutually rewarding and deeply satisfying way.
Industrial Design Group
The Industrial Design Group brings a deep expertise in user focused design (design which solves real problems and reflects user behaviors), contextual design (understanding the product and its “ecosystem”), design for longevity (forward thinking and long lasting design), tangible design (creating early tangible concepts that help ideas become less subjective), collaborative design (incorporating our client’s brand and corporate attributes), all while focusing on the substance of the product through appropriate and informed design.
User Insights Group
The User Insights Group at Speck Design informs the company's innovation and design processes with a deep understanding of the user experience. Through traditional research, ethnography, and a wide array of innovative methodologies, user insights collaborates closely with all other groups at Speck Design at every step to ensure that user behaviors and needs are fully understood and incorporated. Our integrated and iterative process brings the customer's voice to the forefront, providing actionable data to Speck designers, engineers and our clients. This results in design that reflects the user's needs and ultimately drives success in the marketplace.
Communications Design Group
Whether building a brand launch program, developing a brand refresh, or working with an existing brand, our Communications Design Group offers integrated graphics communications. We provide our clients with effective branding, strategic thinking and breakthrough messaging that helps give them an edge over their competitors and succeed in their industry. Our services include logo design, collateral, guidelines, infographics, advertising, website design, packaging, tradeshow exhibits, and environmental graphics.
Consumer Products Group
Our Consumer Products Group is known for delivering expertise in sustainability, material choice and design responsibility to the product, end-user and our client. With deep expertise in electro-mechanical architectures, technology trends, and high volume manufacturability, the Speck Design Consumer Products Group has the depth of experience to deliver exceptional solutions to intricate problems facing the consumer market. Our team applies its ergonomic and human factors expertise to develop intuitive product interaction and appropriate form factor so your product feels right and delivers exciting industrial design to capture the target market’s interest. We also explore boundaries in a wide array of consumer arenas like home healthcare, home energy management, and the youth markets, where creating the intuitive designs and customer desire are the hallmark of a successful product.
Datacom Systems Group
The Datacom Systems Group focuses on the design and development of telecommunications, server, and data center products.
For the past several years, server design has increasingly trended toward lower product costs, higher energy efficiency, lower service costs, increased density, and better product ROI. Speck Design has met these challenges with ingenuity and clever solutions to reduce costs, increase time-to-market, and deliver consistent quality.
Speck Design offers a wide variety of engineering capabilities and has delivered products for the datacom industry that include rack mounted servers, fully rack integrated large systems, storage arrays, switches, routers, and industrial computing systems. We are able to provide our clients with a complete mechanical design for a new project or modify and improve an existing design. Our expertise focuses on electromechanical systems design, including thermal management, structural analysis, and
Industrial Systems Group
The Industrial Systems Group designs and develops capital equipment for industrial and commercial applications. Important product categories in this group include kiosk systems, automated dispensing and vending, telepresence, industrial hardware, fixturing and automation, and outdoor equipment, including sealed enclosures. Core competencies to support Speck Design’s work in this area include design, analysis, fabrication, testing, and manufacturing processes relating to integrated systems, user interaction, large structures, automation, active and passive thermal systems, and environmental protection. A truly interdisciplinary practice, Speck Design’s Industrial Systems group extensively leverages user insights, industrial design, and engineering to develop integrated systems that provide enduring appeal, performance and value to our clients and their customers.
Medical Sytems Group
Our Medical Systems Group provides deep expertise both in product engineering (mechanical design and development, structural design, design for manufacturability, materials, design for clinical use) and industrial design (ergonomics, human factors, styling, concepts, aesthetics, usability). We have delivered a wide variety of medical instruments and systems, including: monitoring systems, handle and delivery systems, implantables and disposable devices, drug delivery systems, robotic systems, laparoscopic instruments, and spinal implants with associated tools. We bridge the gap between inventive design and true usability, applying our industrial design and engineering expertise to develop appropriate designs.
Speck Design maintains Design Control compliant documentation and has full understanding of product development requirements under FDA 21