415-956-1240
San Francisco, California 94133
Metaform Product Development is an award-winning product innovation, industrial design, and manufacturing company optimizing the value, function, and aesthetics of products and inventions.
Metaform Product Development is an award-winning industrial design, product development, and manufacturing company meaningfully optimizing the value, function and aesthetics of products and inventions.
Metaform's mission is to “humanize” technology and devise creative, innovative and appropriate product designs that elegantly address practical issues. Holistically considering a multitude of issues such as the requirements, constraints, costs, market position, environment and end-users, Metaform designers conceive products which are appealing, user-friendly and economical to manufacture. The resulting designs are poised to excel in the marketplace, satisfying the needs and addressing the interests of both the consumer and manufacturer.
Metaform's flexible company structure allows us to serve a multitude of clients with an agility and efficiency unmatched by large, rigid design consultancies. Unlike traditional design firms hampered by bureaucracy, limited talents of a fixed staff and extraneous overhead, Metaform custom assembles the right “tools” at the right time and prescribes the best development process to meet the explicit goals of the project. Metaform is essentially a product development collective that utilizes and leverages a vast network of qualified professional collaborators when needed. We expand and contract the “special teams” squad based on the situation at hand and assemble individual role players to contribute their unique, specialized expertise when appropriate to a particular phase. The judicious utilization of a diverse talent pool in combination with the ensured continuity of a principal designer / managing director fosters a tailored approach that results in the most comprehensive, strategically relevant, cost-effective and efficient results for our clients. All of our deliverables, from concept through Computer-Aided Industrial Design (CAID) definition are handled by the principal or senior level industrial designer, not a CAD operator or junior designer which is often the case in other design organizations. We believe our direct workflow leads to the purest manifestation of the product vision without the distillation of the original design intent that occur when sketches are interpreted by a less detail sensitive, heavier-handed CAD operator or left to inexperienced junior level designers to decipher.
Unlike other consultancies, Metaform shares risks and rewards with clients as a vested product development partner through royalties or equity positions. In addition to standard fee based engagements, Metaform entertains alternative compensation models in exchange for added-value innovation, development of intellectual property and/or lower upfront fees. Aligning our interests with that of our clients’ is a win-win method to promote long term, mutually beneficial collaboration with the incentive to aggressively innovate.
Aside from consulting, Metaform also develops its own innovative concepts for licensing and manufactures its own proprietary products. This cumulative and relevant experience further reinforces Metaform’s understanding of client concerns.
Metaform’s portfolio of projects cover a wide variety of industry sectors from consumer and high-technology products to industrial and sports equipment, toys, furniture, medical and scientific devices. Metaform also assists inventors and start-up companies with conceptual designs and visualizations for licensing presentations, tradeshows, venture capital acquisition, preliminary marketing and focus group studies. Our clients include multinational corporations, contract manufacturers, start-up ventures, individual inventors, and even other design firms.
Metaform’s services range from research to concept ideation, visualization rendering, industrial design, 3D CAID / CAD, model making, engineering management and manufacturing liaison.
The name "Metaform" is derived from the words "metaphor, metamorphosis, and form." Metaform's designs transform and redefine product paradigms and often embody related metaphors to interject functional cues and associative meaning that relate to the function of the product.
Metaform has earned numerous prestigious international design awards including BusinessWeek Magazine’s IDEA Industrial Design Excellence Award, the “Academy Awards” of the design profession, as well as the CES Innovations Showcase Award, Good Design, and ID Magazine’s Annual Design Review Designer’s Choice Mark just to name a few. In 1999, the Bay Area Chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America named Metaform as one of the “Bay Area’s Best” at a Yerba Buena Gardens Center for the Arts Awards Ceremony. Metaform’s work is often included in publications and exhibitions along side the very best of the Silicon Valley industrial design community.
Metaform Product Development was founded in 1997 and is incorporated and headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA with a network of Pacific Rim resources spanning the Silicon Valley, Taiwan and Greater China. This ideal, entrepreneurial, and culturally diverse locale provides an inspirational, creative environment that is in close proximity to the world’s most advanced technologies, cutting-edge emerging trends, and most capable manufacturers.
