Author: Nick Pelios
There is a strange habit in product design. A company decides it needs something new, a team starts developing it, specifications begin appearing, materials are selected, prototypes are made, marketing gets involved, and somewhere along the way someone eventually asks the most important question: does the person who will actually use this need it?
That question should have come first.
Newness has become valuable in itself. Products are expected to change because markets expect launches, retailers expect updates, competitors release new models, and consumers have been trained to associate newer with better. The pressure is understandable. Companies need reasons to talk to customers, designers want to create, engineers want to improve things, and businesses need products to sell. But none of those reasons necessarily produces something useful. A product can be beautifully engineered, technologically advanced and completely unnecessary. It can require years of development, use sophisticated materials, contain several innovations and still fail at the most basic level because it solves a problem nobody actually had.
The opposite is also true. Some of the best products feel almost obvious once they exist. They remove an irritation users had quietly accepted for years. They make an awkward movement easier, reduce fatigue, eliminate a recurring failure, improve comfort or simply allow somebody to concentrate on what they are doing rather than the equipment they are using. The engineering behind the solution may be extremely complex, but its purpose should remain simple: make the experience better for the person using it.
This is the foundation of human-centred design. Instead of beginning with what technology allows us to manufacture, it begins with understanding what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way and why existing solutions are not good enough. The distinction sounds small, but it changes the entire development process. Ask an engineer to make a product lighter and the process begins with materials and structures. Ask why the user needs it to be lighter and the answer may reveal that weight is not actually the problem. Perhaps balance is poor. Perhaps carrying it is uncomfortable. Perhaps fatigue develops because force is distributed incorrectly. The real design brief may have nothing to do with reducing weight at all.
That philosophy was central to the development of ICON. We did not begin by asking how many features could be added to a new generation of carbon fins. The more useful question was what freedivers were still compromising on. Why should a high-performance foot pocket become uncomfortable during long sessions? Why should improving the connection between foot and blade mean sacrificing adaptability? Why should the characteristics a competition diver wants automatically make equipment less suitable for training, coaching, recreational diving or long days in the water? Once those questions become the starting point, product development changes. The objective is no longer to create something new. It is to remove compromises that users have learned to accept.
Listen To The Problem, Not Necessarily The Solution
Designing around users does not mean asking people what product they want and manufacturing exactly what they describe. That is one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding user-driven design. People are exceptionally good at identifying frustration. They know where something hurts, what keeps breaking, which part annoys them, what feels inefficient, what takes too long and what they wish were easier. What they are usually less equipped to do is determine the engineering solution.
That is not their job.
A freediver may say that their foot hurts after an hour of training and suggest making the entire foot pocket softer. The proposed solution sounds logical, but simply reducing stiffness could compromise energy transfer and responsiveness. The valuable information is not necessarily "make this softer." The valuable information is "my foot hurts after an hour."
Now the real work begins. Where is the pressure coming from? Does the foot change position under load? Is one material being asked to perform contradictory functions? Does the pocket need to be rigid everywhere, or only where force needs to be transferred? Could comfort and responsiveness be separated structurally rather than forcing the diver to choose between them?
Questions like these shaped ICON's Adaptive Performance System. ZeroLoss focuses on the connection between foot and blade so that energy can be transferred efficiently. PowerLock rings allow that connection to be tuned, with different levels of rigidity depending on whether the priority is long-session training or maximum responsiveness. AdaptiveFit silicone cushions address the relationship between the foot and the pocket itself, while HydroCore manages water around the foot. These features exist for different reasons, but the philosophy behind them is the same. Instead of treating the foot pocket as one piece of material that must somehow do everything, the system breaks the experience into individual problems and addresses them separately.
The same thinking applies to the blade. A freediver does not experience carbon fibre as a specification on a product page. They experience how the blade loads, releases, tracks through the water and responds to different phases of a dive. ICON's 30-degree blade angle, refined tapering geometry, Hardtip construction and fifteen-layer European carbon structure were not developed because a longer technical specification automatically creates a better fin. Each decision has to justify itself through what happens in the water. If a technical feature does not improve the experience or performance of the person using the product, its value is questionable regardless of how impressive it sounds.
Observation matters here as much as direct feedback. People become surprisingly good at adapting to equipment that is not working perfectly. They change their kick, tighten something differently, accept discomfort, create homemade modifications or develop small rituals around a problem. After enough time they may stop recognising the compromise altogether. For designers, these behaviours are valuable. Watch somebody repeatedly adjusting a piece of equipment and there is probably something worth investigating. Watch users independently creating the same workaround and they may have identified a design opportunity before the manufacturer has.
Performance Is A System, Not A Specification
Performance products create another temptation: designing around numbers because numbers are easy to compare. Weight can be measured. Stiffness can be classified. Angles can be specified. Materials can be named. Laboratory tests can quantify deformation, strength and resistance. These measurements are essential to serious product development, but they do not automatically describe how a product performs as part of a human system.
A freediving fin is a good example because it never performs independently. The diver's foot moves the foot pocket, the foot pocket transfers force into the blade, the blade deforms, the carbon stores and releases energy, and the resulting movement interacts with water. Change any one part of that chain and the behaviour of everything else changes. The theoretically best blade paired with an inefficient connection is no longer the best system. A highly responsive foot pocket that causes pain after repeated dives may produce impressive short-term results but compromise the overall training experience. Maximum stiffness is not maximum performance if the diver wastes energy trying to control it.
This is why ICON was developed as a complete system rather than simply as another carbon blade. The blade and foot pocket were designed to work together because that is how the diver experiences them. The blade extends deep into the open-heel structure, the connection is controlled through ZeroLoss and PowerLock, and the interface with the foot is managed through AdaptiveFit. Even stiffness becomes a user question rather than a simple hierarchy in which harder automatically means better. Different divers have different body weights, strength levels, techniques, disciplines and preferences. A system intended for real people has to acknowledge that variation.
This is also where laboratory development and real-world testing have to meet. Engineering can tell us whether a material performs according to specification, whether a structure survives repeated loading and how different geometries behave under controlled conditions. But a machine does not get tired after three hours in the water. It does not have a narrow heel, a wider forefoot, an old ankle injury or a particular kicking style. It does not alternate between deep training, safety work, coaching and recreational diving. Eventually a performance product has to leave the laboratory and encounter the messy variation of real human beings.
That process is not an inconvenience standing between engineering and launch. It is part of engineering. Feedback exposes assumptions. Prototypes reveal compromises. Something that looked perfect on a computer may feel completely different after repeated dives. Good development accepts this without becoming defensive. The objective is not to prove that the original idea was correct. The objective is to make the final product better.
The Best Design Eventually Disappears
There is a simple test for good equipment that rarely appears on specification sheets. After using it for a while, do you still think about it?
Poorly designed equipment constantly asks for attention. Something moves. Something hurts. Something needs adjustment. The diver changes technique to compensate. Mental energy is repeatedly pulled away from the dive and toward the equipment. Even when these interruptions are small, they accumulate.
Great equipment tends to do the opposite. Once everything is working properly, it begins to disappear from conscious thought. The diver stops thinking about the foot pocket because the foot feels secure. They stop thinking about the blade because its response becomes predictable. They stop making small compensations because the system moves naturally with them. The product is still doing an enormous amount of work, but the user no longer has to manage it.
That idea may be one of the most important principles behind ICON. Performance was obviously central to its development, but performance cannot be separated from the person producing it. A freediver is not a laboratory fixture. They are an athlete whose body changes during a session, whose feet need to remain comfortable, whose oxygen is finite and whose equipment needs to respond consistently across thousands of kick cycles. The objective was therefore not simply to create a faster fin. It was to create a system that asks less of the diver while returning more of the energy they put into it.
This is why meaningful innovation often looks different from innovation created simply for the sake of launching something new. It may involve solving problems users have stopped talking about because they assume those problems are unavoidable. It may require developing several interconnected technologies to address something that sounds incredibly simple, such as making a foot pocket both comfortable and responsive. It may take longer because every change creates consequences elsewhere in the system.
But that is what product development should be.
Not asking what we can add next, but what the person using the product still needs.
Not beginning with technology and searching for somewhere to put it, but beginning with a human problem and using technology to solve it.
Not creating features so there is something new to advertise, but creating improvements that remain valuable long after the launch campaign has disappeared.
ICON is one expression of that philosophy, but the principle extends far beyond freediving fins. The best products in any field tend to share the same starting point. Somewhere, somebody was struggling with something, accepting something or working around something that could have been better. Someone paid attention. Someone asked why. Someone refused to accept that the existing compromise was inevitable.
That is where good design begins.
Not with the product.
With the person who will use it.
Start With The Problem, Not The Product
Author: Nick Pelios
There is a strange habit in product design. A company decides it needs something new, a team starts developing it, specifications begin appearing, materials are selected, prototypes are made, marketing gets involved, and somewhere along the way someone eventually asks the most important question: does the person who will actually use this need it?
That question should have come first.
Newness has become valuable in itself. Products are expected to change because markets expect launches, retailers expect updates, competitors release new models, and consumers have been trained to associate newer with better. The pressure is understandable. Companies need reasons to talk to customers, designers want to create, engineers want to improve things, and businesses need products to sell. But none of those reasons necessarily produces something useful. A product can be beautifully engineered, technologically advanced and completely unnecessary. It can require years of development, use sophisticated materials, contain several innovations and still fail at the most basic level because it solves a problem nobody actually had.
The opposite is also true. Some of the best products feel almost obvious once they exist. They remove an irritation users had quietly accepted for years. They make an awkward movement easier, reduce fatigue, eliminate a recurring failure, improve comfort or simply allow somebody to concentrate on what they are doing rather than the equipment they are using. The engineering behind the solution may be extremely complex, but its purpose should remain simple: make the experience better for the person using it.
This is the foundation of human-centred design. Instead of beginning with what technology allows us to manufacture, it begins with understanding what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way and why existing solutions are not good enough. The distinction sounds small, but it changes the entire development process. Ask an engineer to make a product lighter and the process begins with materials and structures. Ask why the user needs it to be lighter and the answer may reveal that weight is not actually the problem. Perhaps balance is poor. Perhaps carrying it is uncomfortable. Perhaps fatigue develops because force is distributed incorrectly. The real design brief may have nothing to do with reducing weight at all.
That philosophy was central to the development of ICON. We did not begin by asking how many features could be added to a new generation of carbon fins. The more useful question was what freedivers were still compromising on. Why should a high-performance foot pocket become uncomfortable during long sessions? Why should improving the connection between foot and blade mean sacrificing adaptability? Why should the characteristics a competition diver wants automatically make equipment less suitable for training, coaching, recreational diving or long days in the water? Once those questions become the starting point, product development changes. The objective is no longer to create something new. It is to remove compromises that users have learned to accept.
Listen To The Problem, Not Necessarily The Solution
Designing around users does not mean asking people what product they want and manufacturing exactly what they describe. That is one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding user-driven design. People are exceptionally good at identifying frustration. They know where something hurts, what keeps breaking, which part annoys them, what feels inefficient, what takes too long and what they wish were easier. What they are usually less equipped to do is determine the engineering solution.
That is not their job.
A freediver may say that their foot hurts after an hour of training and suggest making the entire foot pocket softer. The proposed solution sounds logical, but simply reducing stiffness could compromise energy transfer and responsiveness. The valuable information is not necessarily "make this softer." The valuable information is "my foot hurts after an hour."
Now the real work begins. Where is the pressure coming from? Does the foot change position under load? Is one material being asked to perform contradictory functions? Does the pocket need to be rigid everywhere, or only where force needs to be transferred? Could comfort and responsiveness be separated structurally rather than forcing the diver to choose between them?
Questions like these shaped ICON's Adaptive Performance System. ZeroLoss focuses on the connection between foot and blade so that energy can be transferred efficiently. PowerLock rings allow that connection to be tuned, with different levels of rigidity depending on whether the priority is long-session training or maximum responsiveness. AdaptiveFit silicone cushions address the relationship between the foot and the pocket itself, while HydroCore manages water around the foot. These features exist for different reasons, but the philosophy behind them is the same. Instead of treating the foot pocket as one piece of material that must somehow do everything, the system breaks the experience into individual problems and addresses them separately.
The same thinking applies to the blade. A freediver does not experience carbon fibre as a specification on a product page. They experience how the blade loads, releases, tracks through the water and responds to different phases of a dive. ICON's 30-degree blade angle, refined tapering geometry, Hardtip construction and fifteen-layer European carbon structure were not developed because a longer technical specification automatically creates a better fin. Each decision has to justify itself through what happens in the water. If a technical feature does not improve the experience or performance of the person using the product, its value is questionable regardless of how impressive it sounds.
Observation matters here as much as direct feedback. People become surprisingly good at adapting to equipment that is not working perfectly. They change their kick, tighten something differently, accept discomfort, create homemade modifications or develop small rituals around a problem. After enough time they may stop recognising the compromise altogether. For designers, these behaviours are valuable. Watch somebody repeatedly adjusting a piece of equipment and there is probably something worth investigating. Watch users independently creating the same workaround and they may have identified a design opportunity before the manufacturer has.
Performance Is A System, Not A Specification
Performance products create another temptation: designing around numbers because numbers are easy to compare. Weight can be measured. Stiffness can be classified. Angles can be specified. Materials can be named. Laboratory tests can quantify deformation, strength and resistance. These measurements are essential to serious product development, but they do not automatically describe how a product performs as part of a human system.
A freediving fin is a good example because it never performs independently. The diver's foot moves the foot pocket, the foot pocket transfers force into the blade, the blade deforms, the carbon stores and releases energy, and the resulting movement interacts with water. Change any one part of that chain and the behaviour of everything else changes. The theoretically best blade paired with an inefficient connection is no longer the best system. A highly responsive foot pocket that causes pain after repeated dives may produce impressive short-term results but compromise the overall training experience. Maximum stiffness is not maximum performance if the diver wastes energy trying to control it.
This is why ICON was developed as a complete system rather than simply as another carbon blade. The blade and foot pocket were designed to work together because that is how the diver experiences them. The blade extends deep into the open-heel structure, the connection is controlled through ZeroLoss and PowerLock, and the interface with the foot is managed through AdaptiveFit. Even stiffness becomes a user question rather than a simple hierarchy in which harder automatically means better. Different divers have different body weights, strength levels, techniques, disciplines and preferences. A system intended for real people has to acknowledge that variation.
This is also where laboratory development and real-world testing have to meet. Engineering can tell us whether a material performs according to specification, whether a structure survives repeated loading and how different geometries behave under controlled conditions. But a machine does not get tired after three hours in the water. It does not have a narrow heel, a wider forefoot, an old ankle injury or a particular kicking style. It does not alternate between deep training, safety work, coaching and recreational diving. Eventually a performance product has to leave the laboratory and encounter the messy variation of real human beings.
That process is not an inconvenience standing between engineering and launch. It is part of engineering. Feedback exposes assumptions. Prototypes reveal compromises. Something that looked perfect on a computer may feel completely different after repeated dives. Good development accepts this without becoming defensive. The objective is not to prove that the original idea was correct. The objective is to make the final product better.
The Best Design Eventually Disappears
There is a simple test for good equipment that rarely appears on specification sheets. After using it for a while, do you still think about it?
Poorly designed equipment constantly asks for attention. Something moves. Something hurts. Something needs adjustment. The diver changes technique to compensate. Mental energy is repeatedly pulled away from the dive and toward the equipment. Even when these interruptions are small, they accumulate.
Great equipment tends to do the opposite. Once everything is working properly, it begins to disappear from conscious thought. The diver stops thinking about the foot pocket because the foot feels secure. They stop thinking about the blade because its response becomes predictable. They stop making small compensations because the system moves naturally with them. The product is still doing an enormous amount of work, but the user no longer has to manage it.
That idea may be one of the most important principles behind ICON. Performance was obviously central to its development, but performance cannot be separated from the person producing it. A freediver is not a laboratory fixture. They are an athlete whose body changes during a session, whose feet need to remain comfortable, whose oxygen is finite and whose equipment needs to respond consistently across thousands of kick cycles. The objective was therefore not simply to create a faster fin. It was to create a system that asks less of the diver while returning more of the energy they put into it.
This is why meaningful innovation often looks different from innovation created simply for the sake of launching something new. It may involve solving problems users have stopped talking about because they assume those problems are unavoidable. It may require developing several interconnected technologies to address something that sounds incredibly simple, such as making a foot pocket both comfortable and responsive. It may take longer because every change creates consequences elsewhere in the system.
But that is what product development should be.
Not asking what we can add next, but what the person using the product still needs.
Not beginning with technology and searching for somewhere to put it, but beginning with a human problem and using technology to solve it.
Not creating features so there is something new to advertise, but creating improvements that remain valuable long after the launch campaign has disappeared.
ICON is one expression of that philosophy, but the principle extends far beyond freediving fins. The best products in any field tend to share the same starting point. Somewhere, somebody was struggling with something, accepting something or working around something that could have been better. Someone paid attention. Someone asked why. Someone refused to accept that the existing compromise was inevitable.
That is where good design begins.
Not with the product.
With the person who will use it.