The best products and services are more than a means to an end; they are a pleasure in and of themselves. To create the best products and services, we focus on the experiences of people. Aesthetics, which encompasses the entire sensory and emotional reaction, is a critical component of a designed experience. Studies by Don Norman, Noam Tractinsky, and others have established the link between successful aesthetic design and both perceived and actual ease of use.
We use four watchwords to guide our aesthetic choices at Daedalus: Clarity, Meaning, Beauty, and Difference. We believe a product's appearance should communicate its function and message while also pleasing the senses and being distinct from competitors. In addition to designing an individual product's intended meaning and message, we have created complete product families as ambassadors for a corporation's brand identity. The designer's core skill is the ability to generate new ideas in response to an opportunity and to make those ideas visible to others. Technology has changed the way this skill is practiced in the 21st Century. Though, fundamentally, much remains the same. At the core is the designer's belief that a vast array of solutions can be generated in response to even highly constrained problems and that the ideas will only get better as other people can understand and critique them. Experience design considers all aspects of a product's design. It fuses the industrial design and the interface design, ensuring both combine to form a cohesive composition. A product with a beautiful shape that fails to consider the user's overall experience will ultimately fail.