I have done more than a handful projects for defense and aerospace companies.
It’s a market with heavy regulatory restrictions and one which tends to be very conservative , perhaps a bit like the medical- device market.
However- Many times I found it gave me a great degree of freedom, as it essentially focus on turning specific technologies assigned to deal with operational objectives and turn them to functional, user friendly products.
Besides HMI guidelines pre-defined by Mil. Standard, many projects didn’t had any vision to how the products would be used and focus mainly on WHAT IT DOES.
By the clandestine nature of this filed, you can’t get any information from focus groups or market research/bench marking, so a lot of the design research is done through observations, interviews and mock-up tests.
Another interesting challenge is what I call the “Hidden client” agenda: Most products have , in fact , two users- The obvious one is the soldier/pilot/Marine which will actually use the product- He is usually a relatively young person -Grown up in the high tech environment we all know , while the other client (And the one who has the money and makes the final decisions…) is a much older, senior general- who grow up in a different era and accustom to a different attitude. As a designer I need to balance this issue and this, I find , Is very different from consumer products , which uses marketing and feedback from beta user testing.