Built by the people behind 280+ delivered products.

Fifteen years of running Cast Iron CAD taught us the same lesson over and over. The projects that failed were rarely engineering failures. They were validation failures. Good design applied to the wrong idea still produces a product that does not sell, cannot be made at the price, or solves the wrong problem.

The early conversations, spec-writing, and viability thinking that would have caught it were either skipped or paid for at consultancy rates. Neither worked well for early-stage founders and inventors. So we packaged the first pass as a structured tool, made it free, and kept the human expertise for when it earns its keep.

Dave is a mechanical engineer and the Technical Director of Cast Iron CAD Ltd. He has spent fifteen years helping startups, inventors, and SMEs take physical products from rough concept to production.

His work spans consumer goods, industrial equipment, IoT devices, and bespoke one-off builds. The common thread is commercial viability: the product has to be buildable, at a price, at a quality, by a supplier who will still be there in a year.

Dave holds a BEng (Hons) in Polymer Engineering and teaches Product Design and Engineering to master’s students at the University of Brighton. The methodology stands on the delivery record, not on a title.

See the 10-stage framework →

The 10-stage framework is not a theoretical model. It is the sequence we learned to ask questions in after 280+ real projects. Every stage earns its place by catching a specific class of failure we have seen derail real products.

The structure builds on the Double Diamond, created by the Design Council in 2004 and shared under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The Double Diamond gave design a universal language of diverge-then-converge. We took that foundation and extended it with the engineering, manufacturing, and commercial validation steps that physical products demand.

Over 35 contributors shaped this framework: engineers, manufacturers, supply chain specialists, commercial strategists, and product leaders drawn from across industry. Their collective experience exposed the failure modes that each stage is designed to catch early.

Cast Iron CAD is the commercial home of this work. It is not the only practice that can use the output. The Specification and Viability Report are deliberately portable, and CIC is a natural next step rather than an exclusive lock-in.