| name | hardware-product-design |
| description | Design and ship a physical product — position the form factor first, prototype physical things, choose input methods, survive manufacturing reality. Use when designing hardware or a connected device, planning physical prototyping, or working with manufacturers. GTM/audience for the physical product → building-in-public. Triggers: hardware product, industrial design, form factor, tolerances, yield, enclosure, wearable. |
Hardware Product Design
Sources/gaps: references/sources.md — 5 Config talks + Fellow/Linear; unresolved supplier/manufacturing candidates in references/coverage-gaps.md. ⚠️ Humane's process lessons stand, but the Ai Pin failed in market — treat its strategy claims skeptically.
The task shape: you're making a thing — atoms, maybe with software inside. The costs invert vs software (iteration is slow and physical, mistakes ship permanently, inventory is capital), so the discipline inverts too: validate before tooling, parallelize hardware and software, and treat manufacturing as part of the design.
Position the form factor first
- Map freedom × presence before designing. Humane used "a positioning graph… on the scales of freedom and presence — where do existing form factors sit today" (desktop: low freedom/high presence; smart speaker: high presence/low freedom) and designed into the empty corner. Make the map; if your device lands on top of an existing form factor, you're competing on execution, not category.
- Own the input method to own the category (Jae Park): "the ones who had a really strong point of view on the input method are the ones who tend to be successful in creating the new vessel category" — Mac/mouse, iPhone/touch. IoT, automotive, and AI devices are still "loose" on input — that looseness is the opening. (For AI products specifically: "there's not a strong point of view on what that input model should be.")
- Watch for inherited "old-world problems." Humane caught themselves debating "where do we put the back button" — "problems that we were bringing with us from our current interfaces." Name the smell when prior-paradigm UI debt sneaks into a new paradigm. The inverse tell (Park): radio buttons on a phone — "that's a mouse UI, why is it on my phone?" Paradigm-mismatch moments are where "purposeful innovation will happen."
